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A comprehensive brief
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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