Items to Include in Case-Briefs:  “vita regulae applicatio”  

Prof. D.A. Hughes                 
 

1.  The Name of the Case & its Citation (including the specific court and the date of the decision). 

2.  The Parties  Who was the Plaintiff?  Defendant?  Appellant?  Appellee?  Petitioner? Respondent?  

3.  The Material Facts   What happened as far as the law is concerned?  Include any important pleaded,
                                     evidentiary, or procedural events.  What facts were critical to the decision? 

4.  The Issue   The issue is a precise question about a legal cause of action (or about one element or aspect
                        of a legal cause of action) as it is joined to the material facts presented by the case.
                        There can be, and frequently is, more than just one legal issue in a case.  Please also notice
                        that the issue in appellate cases is also almost always concerned with whether the trial court
                        has made a material error, that is, error harmful enough to justify reversal. 

5.  The Summary of Parties’ Arguments   The reasoning or rationale put forth by each party (if given).

6.  The Holding and Rule              

The Holding is the exact answer given by the court to the legal issue (or issues) of the instant case.
In its shortest form, the holding can be a “yes” or a “no.”  But it is more common for lawyers to speak of the holding as the issue turned into a full declarative sentence.

 The Rule (coming out of the case) is a more general statement than the holding (articulated by you ex post), which can be applied to future, similar cases.  As a lawyer, you must be able to formulate accurately the rules coming out of various cases, in order that they can then be applied in subsequent cases.  Sometimes a court will state clearly both the holding and the broader rule, but often it will not.  When the court is unclear, you must fill in the missing terms as best you can.

Think of a spectrum of increasingly abstract statements of possible rules with the holding at some point near the concrete side.  The possible rules coming out of a case are increasingly more general or abstract statements of the holding that still make sense as governing rules.

Note that the ex ante statement of the rule(s) used by the court in its opinion (if stated) is often actually then modified by the holding of the instant case, so that the rule that emerges ex post (which you formulate in your own words while you are reading it) may be a slightly different rule than was available before the decision!

7.  The Court’s Analysis of its decision in the case:  the court’s application of the law to the facts 

Because our system is transparent and adversarial, courts seek to explain exactly how they arrived at their holdings by showing in step-by-step detail what the relevant rule(s) of law  are and how they apply to the material facts of each new case.  

This application of the recognized legal rules to the facts of the new case by the court, including all relevant rules, definitions, policy considerations, counter-arguments, rejected theories, etc., is the essence of legal reasoning, and it is supplied in most instances to the court by the lawyers in their appellate briefs. “Vita regulae applicatio!”  (Please also note in passing that a rule from case-law is just one kind of rule that a court might consider when deciding a case.  Courts also consider relevant constitutional provisions, statutes, court rules, administrative regulations, etc.)  Consequently, one of the most important skills that a lawyer must develop is learning how to apply a “constellation” of various legal rules to new factual scenarios, that is, to the new situations of future clients.  This is in some sense the essential nature of lawyering. 

8.  The Order, Relief, or Disposition of the case 

          Affirmed, Reversed, Remanded, Overruled, Motion Granted, Motion Denied, etc.