Law school case brief templates

In short, jotting down one or two sentences about the dissent or concurring opinion can be valuable in preparing you for class discussion. We recommend book briefing. Book briefing is essentially a heavy annotation of a case in the casebook—i. And, you can look at your casebook if you are called on in class and you have everything you need—your notes, as well as the case—in one place.

Every student learns at their own pace and uses case-briefing and book-briefing differently in their overall study plan. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Looking for an affordable bar exam course with a high pass rate? Check out our course options here! Named one of the fastest growing companies in the United States. Thank you for your support!

How to Brief a Case for Law School. Looking for Law School Assistance? Download our free guide on how to succeed in law school here! Access our free law school prep course here!

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We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. In the process, the man lost his grip on the package and it fell onto the rails.

The package was small and appeared unremarkable, but it contained fireworks and exploded when it fell. The shock of the explosion threw down multiple scales at the other end of the platform. One of the scales struck P, causing injury. Negligence is based on the relationship between the parties. The relationship between P and D is expressed by a duty that D owes to P. Unless D violates that duty, there is no negligence. In short, there must first be a duty relationship between P and D in order for there to be any possibility of finding D negligent.

The duty that D owes to P extends as far as the eye of reasonable vigilance would reasonably foresee a danger to P. If a P can pass through this rigorous test of negligence at the front end, a D is liable for all consequences of his actions. Here, the danger to P was not reasonably foreseeable by the eye of reasonable vigilance, so D did not owe a duty to P.

However, P could potentially sue the man with the package containing fireworks. Under these facts, D did not owe a duty to P and was therefore not liable to P for her injuries. If railroads could be held liable for this type of situation, they would be forced to raise ticket prices, etc. Further, it would be impractical for a railroad to check every package in order to guard against this type of danger. The issue of whether a duty exists is a question of law for a court to decide, but if it is unclear whether a danger to a prospective P was within the orbit of reasonably foreseeable harm, then the court should send the case to the jury.

Judge Andrews argued that the question of duty should focus on the relationship between a D and society, not a D and a particular P. If a D acts unreasonably, he is liable to anyone who is injured as a result, regardless of whether the injured P is in the zone of reasonably foreseeable danger.

In other words, courts should employ proximate cause to draw a line where the law declines to further trace a series of events due to social policy considerations. So, there you have it. This is because Palsgraf involves such a stark difference of opinion and reasoning between the majority and dissent. Other than this, the above sample is a pretty standard case brief. You should now feel prepared to tackle a case brief of your own!

Looking for Law School Assistance? Download our free guide on how to succeed in law school here! Access our free law school prep course here! Looking for law school tutoring? What issues and conclusions are relevant to include in a brief? There is usually one main issue on which the court rests its decision. This may seem simple, but the court may talk about multiple issues, and may discuss multiple arguments from both sides of the case.

Be sure to distinguish the issues from the arguments made by the parties. The relevant issue or issues, and corresponding conclusions, are the ones for which the court made a final decision and which are binding. The court may discuss intermediate conclusions or issues, but stay focused on the main issue and conclusion which binds future courts.

What rationale is important to include in a brief? This is probably the most difficult aspect of the case to determine. Remember that everything that is discussed may have been relevant to the judge, but it is not necessarily relevant to the rationale of the decision. The goal is to remind yourself of the basic reasoning that the court used to come to its decision and the key factors that made the decision favor one side or the other.

A brief should be brief! Overly long or cumbersome briefs are not very helpful because you will not be able to skim them easily when you review your notes or when the professor drills you. On the other hand, a brief that is too short will be equally unhelpful because it lacks sufficient information to refresh your memory. Try to keep your briefs to one page in length. This will make it easy for you to organize and reference them.

Do not get discouraged. Learning to brief and figuring out exactly what to include will take time and practice. The more you brief, the easier it will become to extract the relevant information. While a brief is an extremely helpful and important study aid, annotating and highlighting are other tools for breaking down the mass of material in your casebook. The remainder of this section will discuss these different techniques and show how they complement and enhance the briefing process.

Many of you probably already read with a pencil or pen, but if you do not, now is the time to get in the habit. Cases are so dense and full of information that you will find yourself spending considerable amounts of time rereading cases to find what you need.

An effective way to reduce this time is to annotate the margins of the casebook. Your pencil or pen will be one of your best friends while reading a case.

It will allow you to mark off the different sections such as facts, procedural history, or conclusions , thus allowing you to clear your mind of thoughts and providing an invaluable resource when briefing and reviewing. You might be wondering why annotating is important if you make an adequate, well-constructed brief.

By their very nature briefs cannot cover everything in a case. Even with a thorough, well-constructed brief you may want to reference the original case in order to reread dicta that might not have seemed important at the time, to review the complete procedural history or set of facts, or to scour the rationale for a better understanding of the case; annotating makes these tasks easier.

Whether you return to a case after a few hours or a few months, annotations will swiftly guide you to the pertinent parts of the case by providing a roadmap of the important sections.

Your textual markings and margin notes will refresh your memory and restore specific thoughts you might have had about either the case in general or an individual passage. Annotations will also remind you of forgotten thoughts and random ideas by providing a medium for personal comments.

In addition to making it easier to review an original case, annotating cases during the first review of a case makes the briefing process easier. With adequate annotations, the important details needed for your brief will be much easier to retrieve.

Without annotations, you will likely have difficulty locating the information you seek even in the short cases. It might seem strange that it would be hard to reference a short case, but even a short case will likely take you at least fifteen to twenty-five minutes to read, while longer cases may take as much as thirty minutes to an hour to complete.

No matter how long it takes, the dense material of all cases makes it difficult to remember all your thoughts, and trying to locate specific sections of the analysis may feel like you are trying to locate a needle in a haystack. An annotation in the margin, however, will not only swiftly guide you to a pertinent section, but will also refresh the thoughts that you had while reading that section.

When you read a case for the first time, read for the story and for a basic understanding of the dispute, the issues, the rationale, and the decision. As you hit these elements or what you think are these elements make a mark in the margins. When a case sparks an idea — write that idea in the margin as well — you never know when a seemingly irrelevant idea might turn into something more. Finally, when you spot a particularly important part of the text, underline it or highlight it as described below.

With a basic understanding of the case, and with annotations in the margin, the second read-through of the case should be much easier. You can direct your reading to the most important sections and will have an easier time identifying what is and is not important. Continue rereading the case until you have identified all the relevant information that you need to make your brief, including the issue s , the facts, the holding, and the relevant parts of the analysis. We encourage you to visit the Reference Desk located in the library on the first floor with any questions you may have.

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This book reveals how successful law students and lawyers plan, monitor, and implement their work and it provides detailed guidance regarding individual student personality types and learning styles. The accompanying workbook includes questions and exercises to assist students in practicing the concepts explained in the text. The second edition includes greater emphasis on students personalizing all strategy suggestions by adapting strategies to their individual learning styles, personality types, and, most importantly, their results and their evaluations of the causes of those results.