Briefing Cases

Some material adapted from Jean Mangan, et. al., Legal Writing Manual, 3d ed, CC BY-NC-SA 4.10 license.

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Keep in mind what you learned in How to Read Case Opinions and refer back to that section often. Reading a case and briefing a case are two actions that are intertwined but separate. The definitions stay the same, but what you do with the information changes.

What is a case brief?

As opposed to “briefs” (legal argumentation supported by citations and evidence) filed with a court, a case brief is for your own use. A case brief is a systematic, thorough way of taking notes on an appellate opinion. A case brief provides you with the fuel to understand, analyze, synthesize, and work with case law.

To be an effective legal writer and to help clients with legal problems, you must learn how to write and use case briefs. If you go to law school, you will start learning about case briefs immediately.

Creating a case brief allows you to take the information you learned when you read the case and then work with it to use your own words to explain what happened and why.

Required Format

There are probably as many formats for case briefs as there are legal writing professors, with different sections and preferences, but they all do essentially the same things. In this class, your case briefs must contain these sections, with these headings, in this order:

Case Citation:

Substantive Facts:

Relevant Procedural History:

Legal Issue Before the Court:

Standard of Review:

Legal Rule(s):

Reasoning and Holding:

Disposition:

Tips for Briefing Cases

Names: Convert exact names (especially if lengthy) and litigation roles to pre-litigation roles. In other words, before a lawsuit was filed and the parties became “plaintiff” and “defendant” and before an appeal put them in the role of “petitioner” and “respondent,” what were their roles? Pre-litigation roles can matter more to your understanding than the names do. Examples from other cases:

• Not *DaimlerChrysler Aktiengesellschaft, but rather *the German parent company

• Not *Petitioner Calder, but rather *the editor

• Not *Respondent, but rather *the tire company

• Not *Plaintiff, but rather *the motorcyclist

and so on. This tip is not an inflexible rule, though. Sometimes, it makes sense to call the parties “Plaintiff” and “Defendant." But try to find ways of getting to the parties’ pre-litigation roles first.

Dates: You should usually convert exact dates to chronological sequences or date spreads. Examples:

• Not *On June 8, 2008, the company did X and on July 12, it did Y, but rather *The company did X; about a month later, it did Y.

• Write *two weeks later…, *next,… * etc. instead of fixating on exact dates unless the case is about exact dates, e.g., a statute of limitations or default judgment case.

Substantive facts: Focus on the substantive facts (the ones that are essential to the court’s holding and rationale and which, if different, would have changed the outcome) and other facts to the extent necessary for context. The art of distilling facts is something that has to be learned by trial and error. Tips:

• If a fact is essential to the outcome of the case, the court will a) make a point of it at least in its analysis and b) will usually also have mentioned it in the factual narrative portion of the opinion that comes near the beginning.

• Look for cues such as: “in this case,…” “here,…” “As with [cases cited],…” or “Unlike in [cases cited]…”

• Look for language where the court does something with a party’s contentions about the facts, usually by agreeing or disagreeing with those contentions.

Example Case Brief

Below is an example case brief (content warning: sexual assault). Where do you see it following the advice above?

Case Citation: Nixon v. Mr. Prop. Mgmt. Co., 690 S.W.2d 546 (Tex. 1985).

Substantive Facts:

• A minor lived at an apartment building in a large city. She was abducted from the sidewalk near her home and taken to another apartment building across the street, forced into a vacant unit, and sexually assaulted.

• The unit had broken window glass, the front door was off the hinges, and it was dirty and filled with debris.

• The building owner testified that leaving doors off hinges and windows without panes would tend to encourage vagrants to occupy the apartments. He also admitted that a city ordinance required property owners to keep the doors and windows of vacant units securely closed to prevent unauthorized entry. Vagrants had been seen in the area of his building and vagrants frequented that area of the city.

• The president of the property management company testified that one reason for securing vacant units was to prevent this type of crime from occurring.

• In the two years before the attack, police had investigated numerous crimes committed at the complex (one attempted murder, two aggravated robberies, two aggravated assaults, sixteen apartment burglaries, four vehicle burglaries, four cases of theft, five cases of criminal mischief, and one auto theft.)

Relevant Procedural History:

• The minor’s mother sued the manager and owner of the apartment complex on the minor’s behalf.

• The trial court granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment.

• The mother appealed to the intermediate appellate court. The intermediate court affirmed the judgment in the defendants’ favor, holding that the condition of the apartment complex was not a proximate cause of the assault because the abduction and assault were not a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the apartment’s condition.

• The mother appealed to the Supreme Ct. of TX.

Legal Issues Before the Court, with YES or NO answer:

• Does an issue of material fact exist as to whether the defendants’ conduct proximately caused the minor to be assaulted? YES.

Standard of Review:

• De novo. (Court decides issue without deference to a previous court 's decision)

Legal Rule(s):

• A summary judgment requires the moving party to show that there is no genuine issue of material fact and that the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law on the undisputed facts.

• In reviewing a grant of summary judgment, an appellate court must indulge all inferences in favor of the party who lost the motion below.

• The two elements of proximate cause are cause-in-fact and foreseeability.

  • Cause-in-fact means that the negligent act or omission was a substantial factor in bringing about the injury and without which no harm would have been incurred.

  • Foreseeability means that the actor, as a person of ordinary intelligence, should have anticipated the dangers that his negligent act created for others.

• Usually, the criminal conduct of a third party is a superseding cause that relieves the negligent actor from liability to the person harmed by the criminal.

  • However, negligence will not be excused where the criminal conduct is a foreseeable result of that negligence.

  • The specific criminal act does not have to be foreseeable. All that is required is that a “general character” of harm befalling a particular kind of possible victim is reasonably foreseeable.

Reasoning and Holding:

• A reasonable inference exists that, but for the defendants’ failure to maintain the apartment complex, the assault would not have happened.

• The assailant took the minor “directly to a vacant apartment,” implying that he was aware of the vacant unit’s existence and location, such that committing the crime at that time and place gave him an opportunity to assault someone without being detected.

• There were many previous violent crimes at this complex. Although there is no evidence that sexual assaults had occurred at the complex before, the long list of prior crimes included other violent and assaultive personal crimes of the same general character as the sexual assault.

• Deposition testimony established that defendants knew that vagrants frequented the area and that the particular unit had been accessed by vagrants before.

• Under the standard of review, and applying the legal rules to the evidence in the record, triable issues of fact remain on proximate cause.

Disposition:

• Reversed and remanded (Mother wins).