Spring break is over! Oh wherever did it go?
I spent my spring break working. And to answer your question – yes, someone deigned to hire the most notoriously clumsy law student on earth. I think it’s because I carry napkins around and apologize profusely whenever the tumbler from hell spews coffee everywhere…1
My job is in the suburbs, so I spent a lot of time screaming singing and dancing to my playlist while driving. 2
Between the internship, school work, and the random-for-fun cases,3 I read over 100 cases this week. Yes, I am officially blind. Urkle, watch out!
I had an epiphany while reading case after case: there was some structure here, some reoccurring pattern… I thought for a second and almost shouted from my cubicle, “OH MY GOD THIS IS WHAT THEY MEANT BY IRAC!”
The court states the problem (issue), the applicable law (rule), applies the rule to the facts of the case (application), and then …yes, comes to a conclusion. Oh my god. Where was I during legal writing? I knew what the acronym stood for, but I didn’t truly understand how to apply it until this week. 4
And the beauty of IRAC is that it makes legal writing SO flipping easy and clean. It’s brilliant. Opinions are so much harder to read when the court doesn’t follow the “roadmap then IRAC” format.
I might be the last law student to get on the IRAC train, but hey, at least I got there eventually.5
Other thrills of my week included my room smelling like a swamp, finishing a non-legal book, going to the hot-ghetto-mess that is Popeye’s Chicken, and that No634 now has its own facebook page. I wonder how long it will take me to get to 10 fans!6
1 Apparently my ‘professional’ subscribers think this is hilarious because they aren’t furiously scrubbing coffee stains off of a pink H&M shirt…
2Yeah, I’m that guy…and people always wonder why I lose my voice after I drive…
3 Yes, I read cases for fun. Criminal, mental commitment, divorce, and parental termination cases are more bizarre than anything Grisham or Nancy Grace can throw at you. My favorite cases are from Iowa. Not because anything particularly interesting happens in Iowa, but because they use a large font, and double space.
4 I’m not an idiot, I swear. The excerpts of cases in our case books aren’t long enough to see a good example of the structure.
5 I over-thought it. In law school things aren’t as complicated as they first seem. It’s just the simple things in aggregate that look impressive… sort of like a lego castle.
6 That’s the threshold number for me to stop feeling silly for creating the page.