Law School: Case Briefs

The below excerpt about briefing cases is from Professor David Hricik's Law School Basics (Amazon).

Briefing Cases

“Briefing cases” is something you will hear a lot about even before your first day of class. Everyone will be talking about how it is important to “brief” the cases you are assigned to read before the class begins. What is a case brief?

It is not what lawyers call “briefs,” which are documents written to file in a court to persuade a judge on a particular issue. Instead, a “case brief” is a way for you to break down each case you read for class into useful, categorized information.

There is no One True Way to write a case brief. Their purposes, in my view, are two: to make it so that (a) I never had to re-read the case again, and (b) so that if I were called on in class, I could answer likely questions without having to pour over the case. (Cases can be very long, and the ones chosen for inclusion in law school casebooks seemed to be deliberately longer and more opaquely written than they are in “real life.”) To meet these two purposes, my case briefs typically followed this format:

Name of case (court/year)

Facts:
Issue:
Holding:
Rationale:
Dissent:
Class Notes:

We will discuss each part in detail.

In the name of the case, I included information which let me know who was the plaintiff. So, for example, in the “name” section, I might have written:

“Smith (∆) v. Jones (π) (Tex. S.Ct. 1987).”

“π” means plaintiff; “∆” means defendant. You can’t tell from the name of an appellate case who sued whom. On appeal, the loser in the trial court will be listed first in the caption of the case, even if that party was the defendant (the party who was sued) in the trial court, because it is the party which is appealing—the party listed first is the party who lost in the court below and is the one appealing to a higher court. Professors often asked basic questions such as who won below. In addition, understanding the basic facts of cases made them a lot easier to understand. (You will be amazed, though, at how difficult it can be to figure out who sued whom about what.)

The “Facts” section was usually a chronological, short explanation (three or four sentences, or less) of what seemed to be the relevant facts. (You can know which facts are relevant only after you have read the whole case.) I might have written, for example, “π went to ∆-doctor to get nose job. ∆ allegedly made the nose worse. π then sued ∆, and jury found for π, awarding damages equal to the difference between the value of the nose as promised and the value of the nose actually delivered.”

The “Issue” section would lay out the primary legal issue in the case. For example, “Was the proper measure of damages the difference between the nose as delivered and the nose as promised, or should it have been the difference between the nose as delivered and the nose as it had been before surgery?”

The “Holding” would be what the court held the answer to the primary legal question was. For example, “The correct measure of damages was expectancy damages—the difference in value between as delivered and as promised.” This was, in essence, the “rule” from the case.

The “Rationale” section could be quite long. Again, my goals were not to re-read the case and to have something I could rely on were I called on in class. I learned a lot by “outlining” the rationale of the court in some detail, usually following the court’s own structure. Look at the outlines in the appendices to see how I did this. Some are quite elaborate and detailed. It varied a lot, depending primarily upon my mood.

Next, if a judge dissented from the case, I would summarize what he said.

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