NEW YORK, September 2008. Lacking a template, law students often fail to structure legal arguments efficiently and logically. According to bar exam expert Dr. Mary Campbell Gallagher, students no longer enter law school knowing logic, nor do the
law schools teach logic. The description of legal writing that many law schools do teach, Issue-Rule-Analysis-Conclusion (IRAC), while useful as a description, is not the template students need.
Dr. Gallagher is on a mission, to restore logic to its rightful place in the law school curriculum. She will be carrying her message to the Southeast Legal Writing Conference at Nova Southeastern University in Boca Raton, Florida, on September 8. Dr. Gallagher's own system, Under-Here-Therefore™, is a virtually foolproof template based on syllogistic logic. It uses the paragraph and outlining systems Dr. Gallagher presented in the first edition of her book Scoring High on Bar Exam Essays (ARCO 1991), plus the system for factual analysis she introduced in the Third Edition (BarWrite Press 2006).
Scoring High and Dr. Gallagher's system have been praised in the Law Student Journal, the St. John's Law School Forum, the Columbia Law School News, and elsewhere. She now teaches it to aspiring Solons in law schools, bar review courses, and law offices.
Best of all, students like it. In a survey of 50 bar candidates, asked whether Under-Here-Therefore or IRAC
was better, 49 out of 50 preferred Under-Here-Therefore.
BACKGROUND. Scoring High on Bar Exam Essays, by Mary Campbell Gallagher, J.D., Ph.D., including the Under-Here-Therefore™ system, has received enthusiastic reviews. It is widely used as a textbook, and many books and articles cite it, including Planet Law School, by "Atticus Falcon, Esquire," You Can Pass Any Bar Exam, by Edna Wells Handy, A Thousand Days to the Bar Exam, by Dennis Tonsing, and The Law School Bible, by Peter Loughlin. Mary Campbell Gallagher is president of BarWrite® and BarWrite Press. She holds the J.D. from Harvard Law School, the Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Illinois, and the A.B. in philosophy from Barnard College, which awarded her the Montague Prize for distinction in philosophy. Her articles, op-eds, and reviews have appeared in The Nation, Legal Times, The Weekly Standard, The New York Observer, Newsday, and Metro New York. A professional speaker, she has served on the board of directors of the National Speakers Association, New York City Chapter.
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