★★★★★ 4
Must-Have for Law Students
Format: Paperback
This is a good book. A lot of the trouble with law school exams is law professors are notoriously bad teachers, and these bad teachers write bad exams. Granted, this is a worst-case scenario, but if you've been to law school for more than one semester, there's a good chance that at least one of your professors has utterly bamboozled you into how he/she wants the final written. So what this book does is give you something of a blueprint and a method of examining fact patterns and exploring the question(s) so that you can simply go into the exam and take it without much fear.
Where the book fails to be of help though, is with the IRAC method. I wholeheartedly agree that IRAC is a too-constrictive method of writing that tends to inhibit most students from really expressing what they know. Law professors largely want a mechanical recitation of rules followed by mechanical analysis, so law students spend hours and hours memorizing rules with the ultimate purpose of using them in an IRAC format. It's absurd, but that's the way it is. And this book simply dismisses the fact that lazy law professors love IRAC for the fact that it gives them a template from which they can read and score exams quickly.
But still, you can construct an IRAC using this method, it just doesn't lend itself seamlessly to it, which is pathetic--not with respect to GTM, but to the teaching and testing methods used by professors. If you don't believe me, and if you haven't already done so, go look at model bar answers from your state and see if they employ a rigid IRAC formula. They don't. And so to me, that's what this book was good for--being able to write bar exam quality answers that leave room for a different writing styles and methods of analysis.
If you're just starting law school, buy this book. If you're already in and still struggling, buy this book. If you're the king or queen of fastidious, multiple, anally retentive headers on your exams, read this book and go look at bar answers.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2016
