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1. BRIEFING CASES
You are now ready to begin a particularly important part of your class preparation. You now should "brief the main case. A brief is a written summary of the case. To prepare one, you must distill the case's most important parts and restate them in your own words. The effort will provide a variety of important benefits.
First, to describe a case accurately, you must read it carefully and thoroughly. Describing the case in your own words forces you to determine exactly what the court said, which concepts and facts were essential to its decision, and the proper legal terminology and procedures. You do not understand a case simply because you can copy parts of it from your casebook. On the other hand, if you can describe the concept in your own words, you can feel reasonably confident that you do understand it.
Second, after reading so many cases in each course, your case briefs will help you remember the details of each case for class discussions and exam preparation. Case briefs are a particularly helpful study aid because they cover all the cases you studied in class, whereas most other study aids are not so carefully tailored to your coursework. To be most effective, case briefs must be brief. Otherwise, you will have difficulty discovering the salient points in your brief during class discussions, and you will have far too many pages to read for convenient exam review, because you may brief hundreds of cases each term.
Third, briefing cases exercises skills you will use throughout your legal career. As a lawyer, you will have to read and analyze cases with a careful eye to detail. You also will have to summarize cases when writing legal memoranda, briefs, and other documents and when making oral arguments to courts. Because case briefing is such a valuable skill, the time and effort you spend perfecting it in law school will be repaid many times over.
Because case briefing can be time consuming and difficult, especially when you are beginning, you may be tempted to use commercially prepared case briefs. By all means, resist the temptation. The primary benefit of a case brief comes from preparing it. The process of writing a brief forces you to exercise your analytic skills and to dig into all the procedural and substantive aspects of a case. Simply reading a canned brief will not provide this valuable exercise. Moreover, you cannot be sure that the canned brief is accurate or focuses on the same aspects of the case as your professor. Besides, canned briefs are not available for most of the cases you will have to read when you are a lawyer!
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As you become more experienced at briefing, you will get faster. When you have become adept at briefing, you can consider dispensing with a separate written brief and briefing in the casebook instead. You can make the necessary notations in the margins of the casebook and can highlight key passages. You should keep this possibility in mind when you are deciding whether to buy new or used casebooks, because you will want room for your notations. You also can save time by developing a list of abbreviations. Some common law school abbreviations are "P" or "V" for "plaintiff," "D" or "A" for "defendant," and "K" for ''contract."
You now should describe the court's rationale for each holding. This section of the case brief may be the most important, because you must understand the court's reasoning to analyze it and to apply it to other fact situations, such as those on the exam. Starting with the first issue, describe each link in the court's chain of reasoning. Begin by stating the rule of law that the court applied to decide the issue. Next, describe the facts of the case that were relevant to the court's analysis of that issue. Then, describe the court's holding when it applied the rule of law to the facts of the case. Repeat the same three-step process for each issue in the issue section.
After stating the court's rationale, give your analysis of it. Does it follow logically from point to point? Does the court assume facts that were not proved in the case? Has the court stated precedent too narrowly or too broadly? Does the court rely on improper analogies? You must be a critical and creative opinion reader. Note your criticisms and questions so that they are readily available during class and during other discussions with your colleagues and professors.
At this point, you also should synthesize the case you have briefed with other cases you have read for the course. As a lawyer, simply describing the holdings in individual cases is not enough. You must be able to give an overview of an area of law. If two or more cases seem inconsistent, perhaps you have stated their holdings too broadly. Check the cases for limiting language that you previously may have missed. Check to see whether the cases are from the same jurisdiction. If not, the earlier case was not binding precedent for the latter case because jurisdictions generally are free to develop their own common law. Also check the years the cases were decided. If a substantial time gap exists, the latter case may reflect changed societal, political, or legal conditions. Synthesizing the cases will give you an overview of the subject matter and will develop your analytic skills.
3. DISPOSITION
Describe the final disposition of the case. Did the court decide in favor of the plaintiff or the defendant? What remedy, if any, did the court grant? If it is an appellate court opinion, did the court affirm the lower court's decision, reverse it in whole or in part, or remand the case for additional proceedings?
4. CONCURRING AND DISSENTING OPINIONS
Concurring and dissenting opinions are included in a casebook when they present an interesting alternative analysis of the case. Therefore, you should describe the analysis in your case brief. It will help you see the case in a different light. Besides, professors love concurring and dissenting opinions almost as much as footnotes as a source for in-class discussion material!
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