A COMPREHENSIVE BRIEF / TUTORIALOUTLET DOT COM A COMPREHENSIVE BRIEF / TUTORIALOUTLET DOT COM | Page 5

Here you should evaluate the significance of the case, its relationship
to other cases you have read this semester, 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. Don‟t think that because you have found the
judge‟s best purple 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, What does it show about judicial policymaking? Does the result
violate your sense of justice or fairness? How might it have been
better decided?
A NOTE ON FORMATTING
When writing your briefs for this class, you need not double-space
them or use MLA, Blue Book, or any other specific citation style. If
you quote from the case, provide a parenthetical citation to the page in
the reporter (these numbers are found throughout the body of the case,
even in the versions that are available online). Your brief should track
the formatting of this document almost exactly. To make matters
significantly easier, you can use the same headings (1-7 beneath
“Student Briefs,” above) that appear here, and replace the text found
there with your own. The only information you would put under
heading #1 is the citation as it appears in the
syllabus, which you would insert in place of “Title and Citation.”
FURTHER INFORMATION AND SAMPLE BRIEFS
Discussion of the student brief, with examples, is given in:
Delaney, J. (1987). Learning legal reasoning: Briefing, analysis and
theory. Bogota, NJ: John Delaney Publications. [Stacks KF 240 .D39