![1987b]. Currently available on the fourth floor of the UTA Central
Library.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/acomprehensivebrief-170922095839/85/A-COMPREHENSIVE-BRIEF-TUTORIALOUTLET-DOT-COM-6-320.jpg)
A COMPREHENSIVE BRIEF / TUTORIALOUTLET DOT COM
- 1. A comprehensive brief FOR MORE CLASSES VISIT www.tutorialoutlet.com STUDENT BRIEFS A comprehensive brief will include following elements: 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. Since the losers often appeal to a higher court, this can get confusing. The first section of this guide shows you how to identify the players without a scorecard. 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, or one of the computer-assisted legal research tools (Westlaw or LEXIS- NEXIS). For the purposes of our course, you need not worry about this: I have provided the citations for all of the cases you will be reading. 2. Facts of the Case A good student 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. The facts are often conveniently summarized at the beginning of the court‟s published opinion. Sometimes, the best statement of the facts will be found in a dissenting or concurring opinion. WARNING! As we have discussed in class, judges are not above being selective about the facts they emphasize. This can become of crucial importance when you try to reconcile apparently inconsistent cases, because the
- 2. way a judge chooses to characterize and “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 summary of the complaint (in a civil case) or the indictment (in a criminal case—although we won‟t be reading very many of these) 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. 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 significance to citizens and officials alike. Focus on the latter. 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. When noting issues, it may help to phrase them in terms of questions that can be answered with a precise “yes” or “no.”
- 3. 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: More 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. Remember too, that the same case may be used by different 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. Decisions The decision, or holding, 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
- 4. example, “case reversed and remanded,” and—more important for our purposes--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 the language used by the court. 5. 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. This should be outlined point by point in 2-3 numbered sentences. For example, Chief Justice Waite‟s reasoning in Munn v. Illinois: 1. States may regulate the use of private property only “when such regulation becomes necessary for the public good.” 2. Grain warehouses, by virtue of their tremendous economic importance, are devoted to a use (grain storage) in which the public has an interest. 3. Grain warehouse operators, then, must submit to public control for so long as they continue to operate their warehouses for the purposes of grain storage. 6. Separate Opinions Quite often, 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. The author of an “A+” brief will make a note of how each justice voted and how they lined up (such information is “ready to hand” on both Oyez.org and Wikipedia, although the latter site is not always to be trusted). Knowledge of how judges of a particular court normally lined up on particular issues is essential to understanding that court‟s role as a historical actor. 7. Historical Analysis
- 5. Here you should evaluate the significance of the case, its relationship to other cases you have read this semester, 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. It is here that the implicit assumptions and values of the Justices should be probed, the “rightness” of the decision debated, and the logic of the reasoning considered. Don‟t think that because you have found the judge‟s best purple 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, What does it show about judicial policymaking? Does the result violate your sense of justice or fairness? How might it have been better decided? A NOTE ON FORMATTING When writing your briefs for this class, you need not double-space them or use MLA, Blue Book, or any other specific citation style. If you quote from the case, provide a parenthetical citation to the page in the reporter (these numbers are found throughout the body of the case, even in the versions that are available online). Your brief should track the formatting of this document almost exactly. To make matters significantly easier, you can use the same headings (1-7 beneath “Student Briefs,” above) that appear here, and replace the text found there with your own. The only information you would put under heading #1 is the citation as it appears in the syllabus, which you would insert in place of “Title and Citation.” FURTHER INFORMATION AND SAMPLE BRIEFS Discussion of the student brief, with examples, is given in: Delaney, J. (1987). Learning legal reasoning: Briefing, analysis and theory. Bogota, NJ: John Delaney Publications. [Stacks KF 240 .D39
- 6. 1987b]. Currently available on the fourth floor of the UTA Central Library.