example of a legal case study

Writing Effective Legal Case Briefs for Law Students

How to write a case brief, complete with examples.

tl;dr - Case briefs help your understanding of legal concepts and enable you to better prepare for exams. Here are some example case briefs .

As a new law student, one of the essential skills you need to develop is the ability to write effective legal case briefs. A case brief is a concise summary of a legal case that highlights the key issues, legal principles, and holdings of the court. Writing a good case brief can help you better understand the law, prepare for class discussions and exams, and become a more effective legal professional. In this article, we'll explore the key elements of a good legal case brief and provide some tips on how to write one effectively.

Legal case briefs are an essential tool for you as a law student, as they provide a concise and organized summary of a court case. Case brief examples serve as a means for you to understand the facts, issues, and legal principles underlying a court decision, and are crucial in helping you develop analytical and critical thinking skills.

One of the primary reasons why case briefs are important for you is that they help you understand the law in a practical and applied manner. In law school, you study legal principles and concepts in a theoretical sense. However, case briefs provide a means for you to see how these principles are applied in real-world situations. By analyzing and dissecting court decisions, you are able to gain a better understanding of how legal principles and concepts are applied in practice. For example, case brief examples of landmark cases like Marbury v. Madison or Brown v. Board of Education can help you understand the historical and legal significance of these cases.

Understand the Structure of a Legal Case Brief

Before we dive into the details of how to write a good legal case brief, it's important to understand its structure. A typical legal case brief, such as the examples of case briefs available on LSD , includes the following sections:

• Title and Citation: This section includes the name of the case, the court that decided the case, and the citation (i.e., the reference that identifies where the case is published).
• Facts: This section provides a brief summary of the key facts of the case, including who the parties are, what they did, and how the case came to court.
• Issues: This section identifies the legal issues that the court was asked to decide, and focuses on the questions that the court addressed in its decision.
• Holding: This section summarizes the court's decision on the legal issues presented in the case.
• Analysis: This section provides an explanation of the court's reasoning in arriving at its holding, including the legal principles and rules that the court relied on.

Focus on the Key Facts and Issues

When writing a case brief, it's important to focus on the key facts and legal issues presented in the case. You should avoid including unnecessary details or information that is not relevant to the legal issues. Instead, focus on the facts and issues that are essential to understanding the court's decision. This is evident in many examples of case briefs written by legal professionals.

Identify the Legal Principles and Rules

In addition to focusing on the key facts and issues, it's important to identify the legal principles and rules that the court relied on in arriving at its decision. This will help you understand the court's reasoning and the legal principles that are relevant to the case. Many examples of case briefs available online also highlight the legal principles and rules that were applied in a particular case.

Use Clear and Concise Language

A good legal case brief should be written in clear and concise language, as seen in examples of case briefs written by legal professionals. You should avoid using legal jargon or technical terms that may be difficult for a layperson to understand. Instead, use plain language that accurately conveys the meaning of the court's decision.

Be Organized and Structured

To make your case brief more effective, it's important to be organized and structured in your writing. Use headings and subheadings to separate different sections of your brief, and make sure that each section flows logically from one to the next. This is evident in many examples of case briefs available online, which are organized and structured in a clear and logical manner.

So, what’s the point?

Developing analytical and critical thinking skills.

Writing case briefs helps you develop analytical and critical thinking skills. By analyzing court decisions and identifying key facts, issues, and legal principles, you are practicing your ability to think critically and to identify relevant legal issues. Case briefs provide a practical way to develop these skills and apply them to real-world legal problems.

To further develop your analytical and critical thinking skills, you can practice writing your own case briefs. Take a recent court decision and write a brief that summarizes the key facts, issues, and legal principles involved. This will help you become more proficient at identifying relevant information and organizing it in a structured manner.

Preparing for Class and Exams

In addition to being a valuable tool for developing analytical skills, case briefs also help you prepare for class discussions and exams. As you read cases and write briefs, you are gaining a deeper understanding of the law and the reasoning behind court decisions. This knowledge will help you participate more effectively in class discussions and will also help you prepare for law school exams.

To get the most out of case briefs when preparing for exams, you can practice writing case briefs for cases that you studied throughout the year, or to hypotheticals from past exams. This will help you apply the analytical skills you've developed to new situations and ensure that you are able to communicate your understanding of legal principles effectively.

In conclusion, case briefs are an essential tool for law students as they provide a practical application of legal principles, help develop analytical and critical thinking skills, and aid in preparing for class discussions and exams. By studying case brief examples, practicing writing your own briefs, and developing a deep understanding of the law in context, you can become a more proficient and effective student and legal professional. For examples, check out LSD's case brief database .

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How to write a case brief for law school: Excerpt reproduced from Introduction to the Study of Law: Cases and Materials,

Third Edition (LexisNexis 2009) by Michael Makdisi & John Makdisi

C. HOW TO BRIEF

The previous section described the parts of a case in order to make it easier to read and identify the pertinent information that you will use to create your briefs. This section will describe the parts of a brief in order to give you an idea about what a brief is, what is helpful to include in a brief, and what purpose it serves. Case briefs are a necessary study aid in law school that helps to encapsulate and analyze the mountainous mass of material that law students must digest. The case brief represents a final product after reading a case, rereading it, taking it apart, and putting it back together again. In addition to its function as a tool for self-instruction and referencing, the case brief also provides a valuable “cheat sheet” for class participation.

Who will read your brief? Most professors will espouse the value of briefing but will never ask to see that you have, in fact, briefed. As a practicing lawyer, your client doesn’t care if you brief, so long as you win the case. The judges certainly don’t care if you brief, so long as you competently practice the law. You are the person that the brief will serve! Keep this in mind when deciding what elements to include as part of your brief and when deciding what information to include under those elements.

What are the elements of a brief? Different people will tell you to include different things in your brief. Most likely, upon entering law school, this will happen with one or more of your instructors. While opinions may vary, four elements that are essential to any useful brief are the following:

(a) Facts (name of the case and its parties, what happened factually and procedurally, and the judgment)

(b) Issues (what is in dispute)

(c) Holding (the applied rule of law)

(d) Rationale (reasons for the holding)

If you include nothing but these four elements, you should have everything you need in order to recall effectively the information from the case during class or several months later when studying for exams.

Because briefs are made for yourself, you may want to include other elements that expand the four elements listed above. Depending on the case, the inclusion of additional elements may be useful. For example, a case that has a long and important section expounding dicta might call for a separate section in your brief labeled: Dicta. Whatever elements you decide to include, however, remember that the brief is a tool intended for personal use. To the extent that more elements will help with organization and use of the brief, include them. On the other hand, if you find that having more elements makes your brief cumbersome and hard to use, cut back on the number of elements. At a minimum, however, make sure you include the four elements listed above.

Elements that you may want to consider including in addition to the four basic elements are:

(e) Dicta (commentary about the decision that was not the basis for the decision)

(f) Dissent (if a valuable dissenting opinion exits, the dissent’s opinion)

(g) Party’s Arguments (each party’s opposing argument concerning the ultimate issue)

(h) Comments (personal commentary)

Personal comments can be useful if you have a thought that does not fit elsewhere. In the personal experience of one of the authors, this element was used to label cases as specific kinds (e.g., as a case of vicarious liability) or make mental notes about what he found peculiar or puzzling about cases. This element allowed him to release his thoughts (without losing them) so that he could move on to other cases.

In addition to these elements, it may help you to organize your thoughts, as some people do, by dividing Facts into separate elements:

(1) Facts of the case (what actually happened, the controversy)

(2) Procedural History (what events within the court system led to the present case)

(3) Judgment (what the court actually decided)

Procedural History is usually minimal and most of the time irrelevant to the ultimate importance of a case; however, this is not always true. One subject in which Procedure History is virtually always relevant is Civil Procedure.

When describing the Judgment of the case, distinguish it from the Holding. The Judgment is the factual determination by the court, in favor of one party, such as “affirmed,” “reversed,” or “remanded.” In contrast, the Holding is the applied rule of law that serves as the basis for the ultimate judgment.

Remember that the purpose of a brief is to remind you of the important details that make the case significant in terms of the law. It will be a reference tool when you are drilled by a professor and will be a study aid when you prepare for exams. A brief is also like a puzzle piece.

The elements of the brief create the unique shape and colors of the piece, and, when combined with other pieces, the picture of the common law takes form. A well-constructed brief will save you lots of time by removing the need to return to the case to remember the important details and also by making it easier to put together the pieces of the common law puzzle.

D. EXTRACTING THE RELEVANT INFORMATION: ANNOTATING AND HIGHLIGHTING

So now that you know the basic elements of a brief, what information is important to include under each element? The simple answer is: whatever is relevant. But what parts of a case are relevant? When you read your first few cases, you may think that everything that the judge said was relevant to his ultimate conclusion. Even if this were true, what is relevant for the judge to make his decision is not always relevant for you to include in your brief. Remember, the reason to make a brief is not to persuade the world that the ultimate decision in the case is a sound one, but rather to aid in refreshing your memory concerning the most important parts of the case.

What facts are relevant to include in a brief? You should include the facts that are necessary to remind you of the story. If you forget the story, you will not remember how the law in the case was applied. You should also include the facts that are dispositive to the decision in the case. For instance, if the fact that a car is white is a determining factor in the case, the brief should note that the case involves a white car and not simply a car. To the extent that the procedural history either helps you to remember the case or plays an important role in the ultimate outcome, you should include these facts as well.

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.

Annotating Cases

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. Your markings can be as simple as “facts” (with a bracket that indicates the relevant part of the paragraph). When you spot an issue, you may simply mark “issue” or instead provide a synopsis in your own words. 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.

Pencil or pen — which is better to use when annotating? Our recommendation is a mechanical pencil. Mechanical pencils make finer markings than regular pencils, and also than ballpoint pens. Although you might think a pencil might smear more than a pen, with its sharp point a mechanical pencil uses very little excess lead and will not smear as much as you might imagine. A mechanical pencil will also give you the freedom to make mistakes without consequences. When you first start annotating, you may think that some passages are more important than they really are, and therefore you may resist the urge to make a mark in order to preserve your book and prevent false guideposts. With a pencil, however, the ability to erase and rewrite removes this problem.

Highlighting

Why highlight? Like annotating, highlighting may seem unimportant if you create thorough, well-constructed briefs, but highlighting directly helps you to brief. It makes cases, especially the more complicated ones, easy to digest, review and use to extract information.

Highlighting takes advantage of colors to provide a uniquely effective method for reviewing and referencing a case. If you prefer a visual approach to learning, you may find highlighting to be a very effective tool.

If annotating and highlighting are so effective, why brief? Because the process of summarizing a case and putting it into your own words within a brief provides an understanding of the law and of the case that you cannot gain through the process of highlighting or annotating.

The process of putting the case into your own words forces you to digest the material, while annotating and highlighting can be accomplished in a much more passive manner.

What should you highlight? Similar to annotating, the best parts of the case to highlight are those that represent the needed information for your brief such as the facts, the issue, the holding and the rationale.

Unlike annotating, highlighting provides an effective way to color code, which makes referring to the case even easier. In addition, Highlighters are particularly useful in marking off entire sections by using brackets. These brackets will allow you to color-code the case without highlighting all the text, leaving the most important phrases untouched for a more detailed highlight marking or underlining.

Highlighting is a personal tool, and therefore should be used to the extent that highlighting helps, but should be modified in a way that makes it personally time efficient and beneficial. For instance, you might combine the use of annotations in the margins with the visual benefit of highlighting the relevant text. You may prefer to underline the relevant text with a pencil, but to use a highlighter to bracket off the different sections of a case. Whatever you choose to do, make sure that it works for you, regardless of what others recommend. The techniques in the remainder of this section will describe ways to make full use of your highlighters.

First, buy yourself a set of multi-colored highlighters, with at least four, or perhaps five or six different colors. Yellow, pink, and orange are usually the brightest. Depending on the brand, purple and green can be dark, but still work well. Although blue is a beautiful color, it tends to darken and hide the text.

Therefore we recommend that you save blue for the elements that you rarely highlight.

For each different section of the case, choose a color, and use that color only when highlighting the section of the case designated for that color. Consider using yellow for the text that you tend to highlight most frequently. Because yellow is the brightest, you may be inclined to use yellow for the Conclusions in order to make them stand out the most. If you do this, however, you will exhaust your other colors much faster than yellow and this will require that you purchase an entire set of new highlighters when a single color runs out because colors such as green are not sold separately. If instead you choose to use yellow on a more frequently highlighted section such as the Analysis, when it comes time to replace your yellow marker, you will need only to replace your yellow highlighter individually. In the personal experience on one of the authors, the sections of cases that seemed to demand the most highlighter attention were the

Facts and the Analysis, while the Issues and Holdings demanded the least. Other Considerations and

Procedural History required lots of highlighting in particular cases although not in every case.

Experiment if you must, but try to choose a color scheme early on in the semester and stick with it. That way, when you come back to the first cases of the semester, you will not be confused with multiple color schemes. The basic sections of a case for which you should consider giving a different color are:

(b) Procedural History

(c) Issue (and questions presented)

(d) Holding (and conclusions)

(e) Analysis (rationale)

(f) Other Considerations (such as dicta)

Not all of these sections demand a separate color. You may find that combining Facts and Procedural History or Issues and Holdings works best. Furthermore, as mentioned above, some sections may not warrant highlighting in every case (e.g., dicta probably do not need to be highlighted unless they are particularly important). If you decide that a single color is all that you need, then stick to one, but if you find yourself highlighting lots of text from many different sections, reconsider the use of at least a few different colors. Highlighters make text stand out, but only when used appropriately. The use of many colors enables you to highlight more text without reducing the highlighter’s effectiveness. Three to four colors provides decent color variation without the cumbersomeness of handling too many markers.

Once you are comfortable with your color scheme, determining exactly what to highlight still may be difficult. Similar to knowing what to annotate, experience will perfect your highlighting skills. Be careful not to highlight everything, thus ruining your highlighters’ effectiveness; at the same time, do not be afraid to make mistakes.

Now that we have covered the basics of reading, annotating, highlighting, and briefing a case, you are ready to start practicing. Keep the tips and techniques mentioned in this chapter in mind when you tackle the four topics in the remainder of this book. If you have difficultly, refer back to this chapter to help guide you as you master the case method of study and the art of using the common law.

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What is an example of a law school case brief template? 

Here, we’ll provide you with a proposed case brief template as an example of how you might organize your own. We’ll then show you how this template would work in the context of a real case that you could be assigned in your first year of law school. Below, we provide you with more information on what to include in this template. Let’s start with the template.

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A case brief template: a sample for law students

Template of a case brief, name of case.

Start by saying the name of the case at the top of your case brief—for example, Smith v. Jones. 

Identify the parties. Who is the plaintiff? The defendant? Once you identify who’s who, you might want to abbreviate the parties as “P” and “D.”

Identify the procedural posture of the case. Are we at the trial or appellate level? State or federal court? At which stage in the litigation was the case in when the issue arose?

Identify the legal issue that the opinion is addressing. Often, the cases assigned in a casebook are shorter excerpts of a much longer opinion, so the issue will be apparent.  Be mindful of where in the casebook a particular case is being presented—i.e., if the case appears in a section on negligence in tort law, even if the court also mentions causation or damages, there’s a good chance the main issue will be negligence.

Briefly summarize the relevant facts of the case. The keyword here is relevant . An opinion will often include several extraneous facts that are not directly relevant to the court’s analysis.  Feel free to add some irrelevant facts if they are necessary to understand what happened, but don’t get too carried away.  For example, if a Torts case involves a motor vehicle accident, don’t get hung up on the color or make and model of the car unless the court makes clear that those facts are relevant in some way.  On the other hand, you’ll surely want to include, for example, any information about whether a driver was distracted or trying to avoid an obstacle in the road.  In other words, focus on legally significant facts . If you find yourself struggling with this, don’t worry! You will get better as time goes on!

Identify the rule of law that the court applied. This may be straightforward when, for example, the court applies a well-established negligence rule such as the reasonable person standard.  On the other hand, this may be a bit more complex when the court fashions a new rule.  For example, the court might be deciding an issue of first impression and have to decide whether an individual should be considered negligent simply for violating a statute—regardless of whether that violation was reasonable. Or, for example, the court might be applying a well-established rule to a novel factual scenario, and the mere application of the rule to that novel factual scenario creates, in effect, a new rule.

Analysis/application

This is where you need to describe the court’s reasoning.  If the court applied a well-established rule, explain how the court applied that rule to the facts.  Which facts were most relevant?  Which were insignificant?  If the court fashioned a new rule, on the other hand, explain how the court developed the rule and why it chose to do so.

This is the court’s legal conclusion.  For example, did the court hold that the defendant was negligent under a particular set of facts?  The holding can be thought of as the product of the rule of law and the analysis. Be careful not to confuse the holding with the court’s judgment, which we’ll discuss below.

This is where you should describe the court’s ultimate disposition of the case. Did the court grant or deny a motion? Affirm or reverse a lower court? The judgment can usually be just a few words at the end of your case brief.

Policy (optional)

If the court provides any public policy reasons for its adoption of a new rule—or its application of an old rule to a novel situation—you may want to briefly note those reasons here.  Put simply, policy usually consists of the court explaining the purpose of a rule and its application to a particular factual situation.

Dicta (optional)  

Sometimes the court provides an extended discussion of an issue that is not necessary to reach the holding.  This is known as “dicta.” And although it might provide insight into how the court will address similar situations in the future, it is not considered essential to the court’s holding and thus is not binding law.  Of course, lawyers (and judges) may disagree about just what constitutes dicta and what doesn’t, but in any event, if you think the court provides useful dicta, it may be worth jotting down a brief sentence or two.

Dissent (optional)

Not every case has a dissenting opinion, but if your casebook includes one, it’s not an accident.  Oftentimes, a dissent can be just as important as a majority opinion, especially if it highlights a major disagreement in the law or points out significant gaps in the majority’s reasoning.  Further, there’s a good chance that your professor will want to discuss it.  In short, jotting down one or two sentences about the dissent’s point of view will get you thinking about the case from a different perspective and will make you even more prepared for class discussions.

Sample of a case brief

Now that you’ve seen how a brief should be organized, let’s apply the above template to one of the most famous cases that you’ll study in your first year of law school: Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. (248 NY3d 339 [1928]).  This case was decided by the New York Court of Appeals in 1928, and the author of the majority opinion is Benjamin Cardozo—a prolific jurist who later went on to serve as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co.

Helen Palsgraf is the plaintiff (P) and Long Island Railroad is the defendant (D).

The jury found for P in a negligence suit. D appealed. The appellate division affirmed, 3-2. D appealed to the court of appeals.

Is D liable for causing P’s injuries? More specifically, did D owe a duty to P rendering D liable to P for the conduct of the guards?

Two men were running on a train platform to catch a train.  One of the men was carrying a package and seemed unsteady.  A guard on one of the train cars reached out to help the man, and a guard on the train platform—who was also trying to help—pushed the man from behind.  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.

A D owes a duty to a P when the “orbit” of danger to P is reasonably foreseeable—i.e., a danger that would be foreseen by the “eye of reasonable vigilance.”

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.  D owed a duty to the man who was running to catch the train, and the conduct of the guard invaded the man’s property interest, but P cannot sue to vindicate this interest. 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.

The decision of the appellate division is reversed.

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. Even if no reasonably foreseeable harm results from a D’s actions, he is still liable because negligence itself is unreasonable.  Contrary to Judge Cardozo’s approach of making the negligence test rigorous at the front end by limiting the definition of duty, Judge Andrews would use proximate cause in a policy-oriented way to limit liability at the back end.  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. You’ll notice that in the above sample, the outline of the dissenting opinion was a bit longer. 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!

Go to the next topic, Why  shouldn’t  I brief cases in law school?

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• Introduction
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• Part 1: 1L Basics – What is 1L year?
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• How do I answer law school exam questions? (An in-depth guide)
• Where can I find law school practice exams?
• Step 4: Make an effective law school study schedule
• What should my weekly law school study schedule look like?
• What is an example of a daily law school study schedule checklist?
• Part 3: Other Important Law School Skills
• What are “cases” in law school?
• How do I brief a case?
• What is an example of a law school case brief template?
• How do I speed-read cases in law school?
• How to prepare for class in law school
• Why is it so important to go to class in law school (and pay attention!)?
• How do I prepare for class in law school (without wasting time)?
• What are some law school note-taking tips and shortcuts?
• Socratic Method
• What is the Socratic Method in law school?
• How do I survive the Socratic Method in law school?
• Networking in law school
• Is it important to network in law school?
• Part 4: Law Student Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and Other Resources
• Law student FAQ
• Is a law school tutor worth it?
• What are some other JD Advising resources for 1Ls?
• Download Guide

After working with [my law school tutor], Jonathan, I earned grades high enough to land a summer associate position at a big law firm as a 1L. Jonathan was great because not only was he well versed in my 1L courses, but he also is a successful lawyer and a graduate of my law school. It was great being able to talk to someone who not only understood the rigor of my 1L classes, but also had proven tips for success in and beyond law school.

My [law school] tutor Melissa was very flexible to my needs and interests. She helped me achieve Honors grades in three of my four doctrinal courses of my 1L Fall semester. Very grateful for this opportunity.

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