A Beginner's Guide to Legal Education

Professor James R. Elkins
College of Law, West Virginia University

Briefing Cases

Ten Instructions on Briefing a Case
Professor Paul Bateman, Southwestern University School of Law

How to Brief Cases for Class
excerpt from Michael Makdisi & John Makdisi, Introduction to the Study of Law: Cases and Materials (LexisNexis, 3rd ed., 2009)

Briefing Results in Better Learning
Professor Andrew Beckerman-Rodau, Suffolk University Law School

How to Brief a Case
Professor Kimi King, Department of Political Science, North Texas State

Critical Writing Skills: An Introduction to Briefing
Professor Barbara Fines, University of Missouri-Kansas City, School of Law

Briefing Issues
St. Louis University School of Law

How to Brief a Case
John Jay College of Criminal Justice

How to Brief a Case
Lawnerds.com

Commentary from Atticus Falcon, Planet Law School (1998) on the "case method" and "briefing cases":

Legal education is built on the Case Method. . . . Students read several [cases] for each class, and should be prepared to discuss them. For this, the student is expected to "brief" each case. The typical case brief, for a law school class, is a one-page summary, with the following:

1) what I would call "file" information--the "style" of the case (i.e, "X v. Y"), the court from which the opinion came, and--sometimes--the year of the opinion, along with the case reporter citations;

2) the history of the case (a.k.a. procedure), which reports the end result at each step of the way in the lower courts;

3) the facts of the case--as reported by the majority opinion, which may have slanted them to make its decision look more justifiable;

4) the main issue/s to be decided (a.k.a. question/ s);

5) the holding--i.e., the one-sentence "rule/s of law' the case announced;

6) the judgment--who the court decided for, with its effect on the lower court ruling/s; and

7) the rationale--the "why" of the decision.

Sometimes there might also be dicta--more correctly known as obiter dicta (Latin: loosely, "other talk"), and sometimes called "dictum" (the singular form of "dicta"). This is where the opinion says something in passing that's not directly relevant to the holding of the case, but which might have significance all by itself. (Sometimes, it turns out to be the most important part of that case. . . .)

Properly used, case briefing is a priceless tool for mastering the Law. Unfortunately . . . it's a tool you will have to learn how to use completely on your own. The way professors use the Case Method is counter-productive . . . by design.

Judicial opinions are written for the benefit of attorneys and for other courts. For that reason, they typically zero in on the narrow issue at hand--the point/s of law on which the case turns. These usually involve issues on the cutting edge of the law. Attorneys and other courts already know all the relevant basic legal doctrines. There's no need for the opinion to go into any of that. The court implicitly assumes its readers have such knowledge. If you think of it in terms of Gestalt psychology, everything else is (back)ground for the "figure" that stands out--the point/s explicitly discussed in the opinion. This approach makes complete sense for attorneys and other courts. It's efficient and concise.

However, even though the opinions in the casebooks involve issues no longer on the cutting edge of the law, the casebook authors do nothing to provide students with the necessary background information to help them put each case in context. Instead, the Case Method takes the inductive approach, i.e., students are supposed to gradually understand the individual trees well enough to eventually understand the nature of the entire forest. That's the way learning usually occurs in the real world. It's the way, as small children, we go from uttering one or two words to understanding language. It's the way we eventually grasp concepts such as colors, heat and cold, love and hatred, even life and death. But it's the worst possible introduction to the Law.

[This commentary on the case method & case briefing appears with the permission of the author, Mr. Falcon and Fine Print Press]

See also: Kenney Hegland, Introduction to the Study and Practice of Law 77-96 (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 2nd ed., 1995) and for background on legal briefs, more generally, Wikipedia.