case brief assignment

Greetings students,

I found a description online that may help you understand how to complete a

case brief. Please read carefully because you will be completing at least 2 case

briefs this semester.

Student briefs

These can be extensive or short, depending on the depth of analysis required and the

demands of the instructor. A comprehensive brief includes the following elements:

1. Title and Citation

2. Facts of the Case

3. Issues

4. Decisions (Holdings)

5. Reasoning (Rationale)

6. Separate Opinions

7. Analysis

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, through Google Scholar, or one of the electronic legal

databases subscribed to by the library (Westlaw or LEXIS-NEXIS).

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! 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 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 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. 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.

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. 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 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 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 numbered sentences or paragraphs.

6. Separate Opinions

Both 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. Make a note of how each justice voted and how they lined up. Knowledge of

how judges of a particular court normally line up on particular issues is essential to

anticipating how they will vote in future cases involving similar issues.

7. Analysis

Here 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. 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.

A cautionary note

Don’t brief the case until you have read it through at least once. Don’t 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?

Created by C. Pyle, 1982. Revised by K. Killoran, 1999 and by M. Richards, 2017.

SAMPLE

Directions: Use Times New Roman or Courier New size 12 Font. The information in all

areas are single spaced. Double space between the headings.

Draper v. United States

358 U.S. 307 (1959)

FACTS: (Do not bold the information). A narcotics agent received information from an

informant who had previously proven himself reliable, that Draper had gone to Chicago to bring

three ounces of heroin back to Denver by train either the morning of September 8 or 9. The

informant also gave a detailed physical description of Draper, the clothes he would be wearing

and that he habitually “walked real fast.” Based on this information, police officers set up

surveillance of all trains coming from Chicago. The morning of September 8 produced no one

fitting the informant’s description. On the morning of September 9, officers observed an

individual, who matched the exact description the informant had supplied, get off of a train from

Chicago and begin to walk quickly toward the exit. Officers overtook the suspect and arrested

him. Heroin and a syringe were seized in a search incident to the arrest. The informant died prior

to the trial and was therefore

ISSUES: Can information provided by an informant, which is subsequently corroborated by an

officer, provide probable cause for an arrest without a warrant? YES.

DECISIONS (HOLDINGS): Information received from an informant, which is corroborated by

an officer, may be sufficient to provide probable cause for an arrest even though such

information is hearsay and would not otherwise be admissible in a criminal trial.

REASONING (RATIONALE): The informant who provided information to the agent had

provided reliable information in the past. When the agent personally verified each element of the

informant’s detailed description, except the part involving the possession of drugs, he developed

probable cause to believe that the rest of the informant’s description was true.

SEPARATE OPINIONS: The various opinions of the various judges goes here.

ANALYSIS: The evidence from the informant in this case could be considered hearsay, which

ordinarily is inadmissible in a criminal trial. The Court said, however, that it could be used to

show probable cause for purposes of a search; this, evidence that may not be admissible in a trial

may be used by the police to establish probable cause. This is important because all information

from an informant is considered hearsay as the basis for police action, but the police can act on

such information as long as it is good enough to establish probable cause. The Court held that

there was probable cause in the case because the information came from “one employed for that

purpose and whose information had always been found accurate and reliable.” The Court added

that “it is clear that [the police officer] would have been derelict in his duties had he not pursued

it.”