Prepare Case Brief Paper

Prepare Case Brief Paper ORDER NOW FOR CUSTOMIZED AND ORIGINAL ESSAY PAPERS ON Prepare Case Brief Paper Analyze the Supreme Court decision in DHS v. Regents of the University of California. See the attachment to assist you in writing the case brief format. Prepare Case Brief Paper attachment_1 Adapted from: https://www.quimbee.com/resources/how-to-write-a-case-brief What is a Case Brief? Put simply, a case brief is a summary of a legal opinion. The term case briefis often confusing to lay people because the ordinary meaning of the word brief refers to a written argument submitted to a court (such as an “appellate brief”). However, a case brief is neither an argument nor submitted to a court. It is a study tool used by law students to prepare for class and final exams. A case brief might also be referred to as a “legal brief” or “case summary,” which better encapsulates the meaning and avoids the ambiguity of the word “brief.” Preparing to Write Your Case Brief Okay, you’ve decided you want to write a case brief. But when should you start? After you’ve read the casebook excerpt, right? Wrong. You should be “pretreating” the casebook excerpt as you read the opinion. What do we mean by “pretreating”? We mean highlighting, underlining, and annotating in the margins all the information that will later go into your case brief. For example, if the court starts talking about the facts of the case, you should mark up your casebook by highlighting the facts or writing “facts” in the margin. That way, when you go to write the facts section of your case brief, you don’t need to go fishing. The Ultimate Case Brief Template The Skeleton Let’s start with a case brief example that you can use to get started. Go ahead and copy paste these headings into your word processor of choice, and bam, you’ve got yourself a case brief template: RULE OF LAW: FACTS: ISSUE: HOLDING AND REASONING: CONCURRENCE: DISSENT: A case brief can be formatted in many different ways. You should choose the case brief format that works best for you—and your professor. For example, if a professor routinely asks students to recite the procedural history, then you might want to include a separate section for that information. Now, you’ve got your case brief template, but you’re going to need to put some flesh on these bones. 1 The Meat Nearly every case brief should include, at a minimum, the following information: • the facts of the case, • the legal issue, • the legal principle applied in the case, • the holding and reasoning of the majority, and • a summary of any concurrences and dissents. Facts of the Case Many legal opinions clearly outline the facts of the case, and when briefing a case, you might be tempted to copy the court’s rendition of the facts verbatim into your case brief. When writing a case brief, never parrot the court’s language word-for-word; instead, you should always paraphrase the court’s language into plain English. Be mindful of the purpose of a case brief, which is to gain a clearer understanding of the case. The facts section of your case brief should include the following information (if obtainable in the casebook excerpt): • the cause of action (g., a suit for replevin, breach of contract, and so forth), • an identification of the plaintiff and the defendant in the case by party name, • the operative facts of the case that led to the dispute between the parties, • the trial court/jury’s holding, and • the appellate court’s holding. Always identify the plaintiff and the defendant in the case. Never simply refer to the parties as “plaintiff” and “defendant” Prepare Case Brief Paper without indicating which party is the plaintiff and which is the defendant. Sometimes a court will refer to parties as appellant/appellee or petitioner/respondent. Make sure you figure out who’s the plaintiff and who’s the defendant. A good rule of thumb: the plaintiff is whoever initiated the lawsuit. Legal Issue In the facts section of your case brief, you described the cause of action, the factual circumstances leading up to that cause of action, and the procedural history of the case. The issue section is the next logical step. You should identify the legal issue being emphasized in the casebook. For example, if a case in a contracts casebook appears in a chapter on promissory estoppel, then your issue section should also relate to promissory estoppel. Moreover, your issue must not be fact specific. This means that the issue section should not contain the factual details of the case. 2 The issue should be a legal question, not a procedural one. Hence, the following rendering of the issue section is incorrect: “Whether the trial court erred in granting summary judgment for the plaintiff.” Note that the foregoing issue does not bear on anything substantive, nor does it bear on the legal question at issue in the case. Finally, your issue section should be phrased as a question that facilitates a “yes” or “no” answer. Never create an issue that invites an ambiguous answer. Example 1: May a state limit the appointment of members of its police force to United States citizens? Example 2: Does a state law forbidding the teaching of any subject in any language other than English in private, parochial, or public schools within a state violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? Rule of Law The rule of law is the legal principle or black letter law upon which the court rested its decision in the case. A single legal opinion may contain numerous rules of law or legal principles that impacted the court’s final decision. However, for case briefing purposes, your task is to determine the rule of law germane to the discussion of the case in the casebook and to formulate that rule into one, easy-to-digest sentence. Pro tip: Look at the chapter and section headings under which the case appears in your casebook; they’ll tell you the topic to which your rule of law should relate or, if there are multiple rules of law, which one is important. For example, if a case appears in the “Promissory Estoppel” section of your contracts casebook, then the rule of law should be related to promissory estoppel (as opposed to some other topic). The rule of law should never be fact-specific. It should answer the dispositive legal question being posed in the case. Put differently, the rule of law should be the legal issue in the case phrased as a statement. For example, let’s say the issue in the case is: “May a party who repeatedly waives a provision in a contract that is for his own benefit later seek to enforce that provision?” To obtain the rule of law, simply rephrase the question as a statement: “A party that repeatedly, albeit passively, waives a provision in a contract that is for his own benefit, may not later seek to enforce that provision.” Example: A federal law may preempt a state or local law even if the laws are not mutually exclusive if the state law is deemed to impede the achievement of a federal objective. If the rule of law relates to a particular statute or provision, you should incorporate that into your rule. For example, if the rule relates to the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, you should include that in the rule: “Under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress may prohibit discrimination only by state actors, not private individuals.”Prepare Case Brief Paper 3 Holding and Reasoning Now that you have identified the facts and salient legal issues in the case, you are ready to explain how the court decided the case. You should start your holding and reasoning section by answering the question posed by the issue section with a simple “Yes” or “No.” The holding and reasoning section should be structured in a manner consistent with the CREAC method. (Reminder: that’s Conclusion, Rule, Explanation, Application, and Conclusion.) You may also have heard this referred to as the IRAC method (Issue, Rule, Application, and Conclusion) or some other variation. Quimbee prefers CREAC to IRAC for several reasons. The repetition of the conclusion in the beginning and the end of a CREAC reinforces the major takeaway of the case. Also, by having an explicit explanation section, CREAC ensures that the rule of a case is both stated and properly interpreted. Legal frameworks, tests, and principles should be clearly articulated and applied to the facts of the case. You should always explain the rationale behind the legal principles being applied in the case. In fact, perhaps the most common mistake case briefers make in the holding and reasoning section is to omit explanation of the rule (i.e., the “E” in CREAC). The conclusion and procedural disposition of the case should be stated at the end. To recap, the holding and reasoning section of your case brief should contain the following information (if obtainable in the casebook): 1. A “yes” or “no” answer to the question posed by the issue section, 2. The relevant legal principles and rules used to decide the case, 3. The application of those principles to the facts of the case, 4. The court’s conclusion, 5. The procedural disposition (g., reversed and remanded, affirmed, etc.), and 6. The names of any seminal cases or important statutes used by the majority in its opinion. Concurrences and Dissents All concurrences and dissents in the casebook should be covered in your case brief. Concurrences and dissents in casebook opinions are often short in length and so should be your summary of that material. Be sure to answer specifically the question of why a judge decided to write separately. Examples: CONCURRENCE: (Widener, J.) The district court should not be reversed based on due process, but rather on criminal procedure. The burden of production of evidence is not on the defendant or the court; it is on the prosecution. DISSENT: (Russell, J.) The trial judge’s calling of the Cassitys was proper. The majority’s reasoning makes its holding significantly broader than its presumed intention. If a district 4 court is not permitted to step in as the role of prosecutor, a district court would never be permitted to call its own witness. Moreover, the fact that the Cassitys’ testimony was vital to the case is all the more reason that the trial judge properly called the witnesses. A court does not become impartial by simply calling a witness for one side or the other. Finally, if there was any error in failing to instruct the jury on why the court called the Cassitys, such error was harmless. Note, too, that sometimes a judge or justice will concur in part and dissent in part. Make sure to note this in your brief, for example, by using the header “CONCURRENCE/DISSENT.” 5 … z Get a 10 % discount on an order above $ 100 Use the following coupon code : NURSING10