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Writing a legal essay is a demanding challenge. Constitutional law in particular is filled with subtleties that that must be grasped in order to produce a lucid and engaging analysis. Regardless of whether you are writing your essay for a law school exam or for a legal publication, you should use the same basic framework for solving the legal problems you present--Issue, Rule, Analysis and Conclusion (IRAC).
Instructions
1. Identify the issues that your essay will deal with. These issues must be stated with specificity--"Whether the Due Process clause allows habeus corpus petitions to be filed by those committed to mental institutions but not convicted of crimes," for example. List these issues on a separate sheet of paper.
2. Create an IRAC outline for each of your issues--the particular issue should be listed first, followed by spaces for rule, analysis and conclusion for each listed issue.
3. Identify the legal rule that applies to the first issue you have identified. This rule may be actual text from the Constitution ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion", for example), a judicial interpretation of constitutional text (preferably issued by the Supreme Court), or a combination of both. Try to keep it as simple as possible.
4. Analyze apply the applicable rule to the issue. Feel free to use your own judgment during this phase, but always make sure that your argument is rational. Take the objective point of view of a judge rather than an advocacy point of view of an attorney. Be sure to perform appropriate research, because constitutional law is a particularly well-settled area of law with relatively few points of fundamental ambiguity.
5. State your conclusion, preferably in a single sentence. Make sure that your conclusion follows logically from your analysis.
6. Repeat the IRAC process for each of your issues.
7. Create an introduction and a conclusion (this is appropriate only for articles in legal publications, not law school exams). The introduction should present the conclusions you are trying to establish, and the conclusion should summarize how you established them in the body of your essay (the IRAC section).
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