Select a useful case brief format. There are many different ways to brief a case. You should use the format that is most useful for your class and exam preparations. Regardless of form, every brief should include the following information in steps Use the right caption when naming the brief. A brief should begin with the case name, the court that decided it, the year it was decided, and the page on which it appears in the casebook. Identify the case facts. Next, state the facts of the case.
This section is necessary because legal principles are defined by the situations in which they arise. Include in your brief only those facts that are legally relevant. A fact is legally relevant if it had an impact on the case's outcome. For example, in a personal injury action arising from a car accident, the color of the parties' cars seldom would be relevant to the case's outcome.
Similarly, if the plaintiff and defendant presented different versions of the facts, you should describe those differences only if they are relevant to the court's consideration of the case. Supreme Court ruffled feathers with some proposed changes to its rules.
One of the biggest changes would be cutting the allowed length of reply briefs from 6, words to 4, words. Merit briefs also would face a lower word-count limit, going to 13, from the previous max length of 15, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Even if this were true, what is relevant for the judge to make his decision is not always relevant for you to include in your brief.
Remember, the reason to make a brief is not to persuade the world that the ultimate decision in the case is a sound one, but rather to aid in refreshing your memory concerning the most important parts of the case. What facts are relevant to include in a brief? You should include the facts that are necessary to remind you of the story.
If you forget the story, you will not remember how the law in the case was applied. You should also include the facts that are dispositive to the decision in the case.
For instance, if the fact that a car is white is a determining factor in the case, the brief should note that the case involves a white car and not simply a car.
To the extent that the procedural history either helps you to remember the case or plays an important role in the ultimate outcome, you should include these facts as well. What issues and conclusions are relevant to include in a brief?
There is usually one main issue on which the court rests its decision. This may seem simple, but the court may talk about multiple issues, and may discuss multiple arguments from both sides of the case.
Be sure to distinguish the issues from the arguments made by the parties. The relevant issue or issues, and corresponding conclusions, are the ones for which the court made a final decision and which are binding. The court may discuss intermediate conclusions or issues, but stay focused on the main issue and conclusion which binds future courts.
What rationale is important to include in a brief? This is probably the most difficult aspect of the case to determine. Remember that everything that is discussed may have been relevant to the judge, but it is not necessarily relevant to the rationale of the decision. The goal is to remind yourself of the basic reasoning that the court used to come to its decision and the key factors that made the decision favor one side or the other.
A brief should be brief! Overly long or cumbersome briefs are not very helpful because you will not be able to skim them easily when you review your notes or when the professor drills you. On the other hand, a brief that is too short will be equally unhelpful because it lacks sufficient information to refresh your memory. Try to keep your briefs to one page in length. This will make it easy for you to organize and reference them.
Do not get discouraged. Learning to brief and figuring out exactly what to include will take time and practice. The more you brief, the easier it will become to extract the relevant information. While a brief is an extremely helpful and important study aid, annotating and highlighting are other tools for breaking down the mass of material in your casebook.
The remainder of this section will discuss these different techniques and show how they complement and enhance the briefing process. Many of you probably already read with a pencil or pen, but if you do not, now is the time to get in the habit. Cases are so dense and full of information that you will find yourself spending considerable amounts of time rereading cases to find what you need. An effective way to reduce this time is to annotate the margins of the casebook.
Your pencil or pen will be one of your best friends while reading a case. It will allow you to mark off the different sections such as facts, procedural history, or conclusions , thus allowing you to clear your mind of thoughts and providing an invaluable resource when briefing and reviewing. You might be wondering why annotating is important if you make an adequate, well-constructed brief.
By their very nature briefs cannot cover everything in a case. Even with a thorough, well-constructed brief you may want to reference the original case in order to reread dicta that might not have seemed important at the time, to review the complete procedural history or set of facts, or to scour the rationale for a better understanding of the case; annotating makes these tasks easier. Whether you return to a case after a few hours or a few months, annotations will swiftly guide you to the pertinent parts of the case by providing a roadmap of the important sections.
Your textual markings and margin notes will refresh your memory and restore specific thoughts you might have had about either the case in general or an individual passage. Annotations will also remind you of forgotten thoughts and random ideas by providing a medium for personal comments.
In addition to making it easier to review an original case, annotating cases during the first review of a case makes the briefing process easier.
With adequate annotations, the important details needed for your brief will be much easier to retrieve. Without annotations, you will likely have difficulty locating the information you seek even in the short cases. It might seem strange that it would be hard to reference a short case, but even a short case will likely take you at least fifteen to twenty-five minutes to read, while longer cases may take as much as thirty minutes to an hour to complete.
No matter how long it takes, the dense material of all cases makes it difficult to remember all your thoughts, and trying to locate specific sections of the analysis may feel like you are trying to locate a needle in a haystack.
Student brief A student brief is a short summary and analysis of the case prepared for use in classroom discussion. The parties and how to keep track of them Beginning students often have difficulty identifying relationships between the parties involved in court cases.
The following definitions may help: Plaintiffs sue defendants in civil suits in trial courts. Student briefs These can be extensive or short, depending on the depth of analysis required and the demands of the instructor. Title and Citation The title of the case shows who is opposing whom. Facts of the Case A good student brief will include a summary of the pertinent facts and legal points raised in the case.
The fact section of a good student brief will include the following elements: A one-sentence description of the nature of the case, to serve as an introduction. A statement of the relevant law, with quotation marks or underlining to draw attention to the key words or phrases that are in dispute.
A summary of the complaint in a civil case or the indictment in a criminal case plus relevant evidence and arguments presented in court to explain who did what to whom and why the case was thought to involve illegal conduct. A summary of actions taken by the lower courts, for example: defendant convicted; conviction upheld by appellate court; Supreme Court granted certiorari.
Issues The issues or questions of law raised by the facts peculiar to the case are often stated explicitly by the court. Reasoning The reasoning, or rationale, is the chain of argument which led the judges in either a majority or a dissenting opinion to rule as they did. Separate Opinions Both concurring and dissenting opinions should be subjected to the same depth of analysis to bring out the major points of agreement or disagreement with the majority opinion.
Analysis Here the student should evaluate the significance of the case, its relationship to other cases, its place in history, and what is shows about the Court, its members, its decision-making processes, or the impact it has on litigants, government, or society.
Further information and sample briefs Many of the guides to legal research and writing include a discussion of student briefs, appellate briefs and other types of legal memoranda used by practicing attorneys.
Examples and more information can be found in the library books listed below: Bahrych, L. Legal writing in a nutshell 4 th ed. Paul, Minn. S68 Clary, B. Successful legal analysis and writing: The fundamentals 2 nd ed.
Law C53 ] Edwards, L. Legal writing and analysis 2 nd ed. Law and Reserve Room KF E ] Garner, B. The winning brief: tips for persuasive briefing in trial and appellate courts 2 nd ed.
New York: Oxford University Press. Law KF G37 ] Hames, J. Legal research, analysis, and writing 5 th ed. H36 ; For 3 rd ed.
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