Legal Analysis

Most if not all people sitting for a bar exam have heard of the acronym "IRAC."  When analyzing a legal issue it's said that you should first state the issue, then state the rule that will resolve the issue, then analyze the rule, and finally draw a conclusion based on the analysis.  I highly recommend this approach for a bar exam; it's clear, and efficient.

But it's not a skill that comes easy, which is why many people struggle with bar exam essays.  Many of the available points on essays come from the analysis aspect of IRAC and to perform well at legal analysis requires lots of practice. The analogy I often use to explain how best to analyze a legal rule is to treat the rule as if it were a car engine, or a television, or a computer. Imagine that your goal was to figure out whether the piece of electronics contains all the necessary parts or if there is something missing that might prevent it from working properly. Only once you've analyzed all the parts could you be confident in drawing a conclusion as to whether the item contains all the parts required for it to work properly.

For example, let's take a simple intentional tort, battery.  A common definition that one might read for this tort is that battery is a harmful or offensive contact with the person of another without the other person's consent.  To analyze this rule you need to look at each individual part of the the rule. Break the rule up into its component parts. Was the act harmful or would it be deemed offensive by a reasonable person? Was there a contact? Was the contact with the person of another? Did the other person give consent to this contact? Was there perhaps some kind of implied consent? 

Once you've addressed all of the individual components of the rule, and only once you've addressed them, are you then prepared to conclude whether or not there has in fact been a battery.

That, in short, is legal analysis. You first take the rule apart. You then examine each component of the rule. Once you've done so, you put the rule back together and explain what you've concluded. It'll take you far on a bar exam in which the objective is to score points because the approach will allow you to analyze the rules in a way that it'll make it difficult for the grader not to award them.