Two kinds of formulas can help you draft your argument. The first formula is the formula of assertions and arguments that you create to answer the questions that your case presents.

Chapter Four was meant to help you craft that formula, to decide how to structure your analysis of the issues and assertions relevant to your argument. That formula is unique to this set of facts and issues in this jurisdiction at this time; you might be able to reuse certain elements in the formula, but it is doubtful you would ever write another brief with that identical set of assertions and arguments.

The second kind of formula that can help you draft your argument is far from unique: It can be recycled forever, for as many times as you need it. Similar formulas go by their various acronyms, including IREAC, and CRuPAC. As will be explained here, in this book, it is called CREAC,¹and it can be used whenever you use a “unit of discourse” to analyze a legal point. As George Gopen has noted, a “unit of discourse” is “anything in prose that has a beginning and an end: a phrase, clause, sentence, paragraph, section, [or] subsection.”²In analytical writing, then, a “CREAC unit of discourse” refers to a section or subsection in which you use legal analysis to prove the truth or validity of a legal assertion.

CREAC is adapted from a syllogistic formula that many first-year law students learn as a method of organizing legal analysis. The acronym for that formula is “IRAC,” and it stands for Issue-Rule-Application-Conclusion. IRAC and similar formulas can be helpful because they can give you a heuristic, or protocol, to guide you to answer vital questions about your arguments. Your outline has identified the issues that you think the court needs to address. For each of those issues, you must answer four questions, questions that IRAC alone won’t answer:

1. What rule governs this issue? 2. What does this rule mean? 3. How should this rule be applied (or not applied) in this case? 4. What impact does that application have on the court’s decision in this case?

We can illustrate how we need to adapt IRAC by beginning with a familiar syllogism:

Issue: Is Socrates mortal? Rule: All human beings are mortal.

You may notice a problem in this syllogism. The rule application (the minor premise) must be connected to the rule (the major premise), but that connection is not obvious in this example. So we move beyond the syllogism to create a formula that fills the gap by asking the writer to explain what the rule means in this context:

Issue: Is Socrates mortal? Rule: All human beings are mortal. Explanation: Men and women are human beings. Application: Socrates is a man. Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

The rule explanation makes it easier to show the reader how the rule about mortality connects to the facts about Socrates. Admittedly, rule explanation gets more complicated when we get beyond the question of simple mortality. Nevertheless, the formula remains the same, with some minor adaptations for advocacy writing. Instead of beginning the argument by stating the legal issue as a question, we state it as an assertion, or a conclusion. We change the second “conclusion” to “Connection-Conclusion” to distinguish it from the first conclusion, and to remind us that, at the end of the formula (and thus at the end of each CREAC unit of discourse), we should connect our analysis to the point we are making in that section of the argument, and sometimes to the overall thesis. Therefore, our formula changes from IRAC to CREAC, and it now looks like this:

Conclusion: Rule: Explanation: Application:

Socrates is mortal. All human beings are mortal. Men and women are human beings. Socrates is a man.

Connection-Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

Thus, for each point you need to prove in your argument, you should write a CREAC unit of discourse, or “a CREAC.” Note that, just as the “under-does-when” formula sometimes morphs into “under-can-when” or “under-does-include,” the “E” in CREAC, as we will discuss below, sometimes stands for “Evidence” rather than “Explanation.” Likewise, as will be discussed in Section 5.2 below, you will provide less detailed analysis (or sometimes none at all) for points that are essential but that do not need to be proved in the same depth.

Some writers have a hard time understanding the CREAC formula. They may try to make the whole argument section one long CREAC, or they can’t decide which elements are worthy of a CREAC analysis and which elements are not. At this stage of the writing process, let your outline dictate your structure. Presume that you need to write a CREAC unit of discourse for each point in your outline. Writing up the analysis will teach you about the point, and you may discover that some points are not controversial (and so do not need a CREAC analysis), while other points are more complex than you realized (and thus may need to be divided into two or more CREACs). See Illustration 5.1 for a guideline you can use to identify where you need to supply a CREAC analysis within your argument. Each element of the CREAC formula is explained more fully below.