case brief assignment

1. Title and Citation

The title of the case shows who is opposing whom. The name of the person who initiated legal action in that particular court will always appear first.

The citation tells how to locate the reporter of the case in the appropriate case reporter. If you know only the title of the case, the citation to it can be found using the case digest covering that court, through Google Scholar or another electronic legal database.

Example: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)

2. Facts

This is a critical part of the brief. A good brief will include a summary of the pertinent facts and legal points raised in the case. It will show the nature of the litigation, who sued whom, based on what occurrences, and what happened in the lower court/s. This section stipulates the legal issue about which the plaintiff can sue and the rule the court will choose to apply in order to arrive at a resolution. Your fact section should aim to accomplish three things:

 Make clear who the parties are. It can be confusing if you just write “plaintiff” and “defendant,” so include more details, such as “Seller (Rogan Corp.—plaintiff)” or “the appellee, Thompson (the buyer)”

 Tell the story briefly rather than just list facts. This helps you remember the details and puts the rule into context. If the order of events matters, make a timeline. Don’t rewrite the fact section. A few brief sentences should almost always suffice to summarize the key facts in a usable narrative.

 Keep your focus on the facts that determine the outcome. This means that you have to figure out, before you brief, which facts were the relevant ones upon which the judge based her decision. When you are asked to “state the case” in class, your goal is to cover these three points: tell the story of what happened clearly but succinctly, concentrating on the facts that determined the outcome, and clearly identifying the parties.
The facts are often conveniently summarized at the beginning of the court’s published opinion; however, sometimes the best statement of the facts will be found in a dissenting or concurring opinion. WARNING! Judges are not above being selective about the facts they emphasize. This can become of crucial importance when you try to reconcile inconsistent cases because the way a judge chooses to characterize or “edit” the facts often determines which way he or she will vote and, as a result, which rule of law will be applied.
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.

3. Issues

The issues or questions of law raised by the facts peculiar to the case are often stated explicitly by the court (be sure to find the legal question, not the factual question). Again, watch out for the occasional judge who misstates the questions raised by the lower court’s opinion, by the parties on appeal, or by the nature of the case.

Constitutional cases frequently involve multiple issues, some of interest only to litigants and lawyers, others of broader and enduring significant to citizens and officials alike. Be sure you have included both.

With rare exceptions, the outcome of an appellate case will turn on the meaning of a provision of the Constitution, a law, or a judicial doctrine. Capture that provision or debated point in your restatement of the issue. Set it off with quotation marks or underline it. This will help you later when you try to reconcile conflicting cases.

Be sure that you are finding the legal question, not a factual question.

When noting issues, it may help to phrase them in terms of questions that can be answered with a precise “yes” or “no.”

For example, the famous case of Brown v. Board of Education involved the applicability of a provision of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to a school board’s practice of excluding black pupils from certain public schools solely due to their race. The precise wording of the Amendment is “no state shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The careful student would begin by identifying the key phrases from this amendment and deciding which of them were really at issue in this case. Assuming that there was no doubt that the school board was acting as the State, and that Miss Brown was a “person within its jurisdiction,” then the key issue would be “Does the exclusion of students from a public school solely on the basis of race amount to a denial of ‘equal protection of the laws’?”

Of course the implications of this case went far beyond the situation of Miss Brown, the Topeka School Board, or even public education. They cast doubt on the continuing validity of prior decisions in which the Supreme Court had held that restriction of Black Americans to “separate but equal” facilities did not deny them “equal protection of the laws.” Make note of any such implications in your statement of issues at the end of the brief, in which you set out your observations and comments.

NOTE: Many students misread cases because they fail to see the issues in terms of the applicable law or judicial doctrine than for any other reason. There is no substitute for taking the time to frame carefully the questions, so that they actually incorporate the key provisions of the law in terms capable of being given precise answers. It may also help to label the issues, for example, “procedural issues,” “substantive issues,” “legal issue,” and so on. Remember too, that the same case may be used by instructors for different purposes, so part of the challenge of briefing is to identify those issues in the case which are of central importance to the topic under discussion in class.

4. Rule

A judge resolves disputes by applying facts to a legal rule. The choice of the rule is determined by the legal issue in dispute. Picking out the rule controlling a case is an important skill because, of course, that rule is the statement of the law for which the opinion stands. It is a good idea to copy the rule from the opinion straight into your brief; however, be sure that you have identified the correct rule. Judges do not always come out and say, “the rule controlling this case is . . . .” Sometimes the judge might talk about different rules, or different versions of the rule. Think about the issue and the analysis and ask yourself whether the statement you think is the rule is really what is driving the opinion toward its outcome.

5. Holding

The holding, or decision, is the court’s answer to a question presented to it for answer by the parties involved or raised by the court itself in its own reading of the case. There are narrow procedural holdings, for example, “case reversed and remanded,” broader substantive holdings which deal with the interpretation of the Constitution, statutes, or judicial doctrines. If the issues have been drawn precisely, the holdings can be stated in simple “yes” or “no” answers or in short statements taken from thelanguage used by the court.

6. Analysis/Reasoning

Firstly, 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. This should be clearly and logically outlined point by point in numbered sentences or paragraphs.

Secondly, 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.

7. Separate Opinions

Concurring and dissenting opinions should be subjected to the same depth of analysis as the majority opinion to bring out the major points of agreement or disagreement with the majority opinion. Make a note of how each justice voted and how they lined up because knowledge of how judges normally line up on particular issues is essential to anticipating how they will vote in future cases involving similar issues. Furthermore, concurring and dissenting opinions provide insight into how future cases are decided.

8. Definitions

How can you understand a case if you do not understand what the words in the case mean? Use your briefs to record two or three new definitions you had to look up in the dictionary. Or, this can be the introduction of significant legal terms.

A cautionary note

Do not brief the case until you have read it through at least once. Do not think that because you have found the judge’s best prose you have necessarily extracted the essence of the decision. Look for unarticulated premises, logical fallacies, manipulation of the factual record, or distortions of precedent. Then ask, how does this case relate to other cases in the same general area of law? What does it show

about judicial policymaking? Does the result violate your sense of justice or fairness? How might it have been better decided?