Legal Research and Writing

Writing Assignments #2: McGuiggan case brief
Rough draft due: Tuesday, January 13
Final daft due: Thursday, January 15

The purpose of a case brief is to: (1) identify the parties to the action; (2) summarize succinctly and clearly the facts giving rise to the legal controversy; (3) state the precise legal issue(s) presented by the facts; (4) summarize the reasoning the court used to reach its decision (this will be the longest section); and (5) state the new principle of law established by the case. The audience for your case brief is yourself or someone else who needs a brief, accurate, and complete summary of the case. All cases have a unique set of facts that the court analyzes by applying general principles of law. Your case brief should state the legal principles the court relies on and explain how the court applied those principles to the facts of the case. The outcome of the case will establish a new principle of law that future courts will apply to other fact patterns.

Be sure to follow these guidelines, as well as the guidelines in the syllabus, for all case briefs. Double space your brief and number the pages. You should set up your brief using the format below. You may have written briefs for other classes using a different format; please use this format for this assignment.

Click here for a sample brief.

At the top of the first page, put your name in the upper right hand corner. In the center of the page, cite the case like this:

McGuiggan v. New England Telephone and Telegraph, Co.
398 Mass. 152 496 N.E.2d 141 (1986)

PARTIES: Identify the parties in the case and their relationship to each other. The party bringing the lawsuit is called a plaintiff and the party defending the lawsuit is called the defendant. If the case is an appeal, the party bringing the appeal is called the appellant and the party defending the appeal is called the appellee.

FACTS: Write a short narrative of the events leading up to this court action. Include only the facts that are necessary to make sense out of the case. Omit facts that are not relevant to the court’s reasoning. End this section with an explanation of how the case got to court, e.g. who brought the case to court and what the legal claims were. If the case is an appeal, include what happened in the lower courts, e.g. who won and why.

ISSUE: Define the legal dispute before the court in the form of a question. Frame your issue as precisely as you can and make it specific to this case and these facts. Each issue should be stated in a separate question. This is not easy to do at first. Do the best you can; you will get better at it. Here’s an example of a legal issue: “Did defendant’s hiring of a lesser-qualified candidate who was 20 years younger violate plaintiff’s Fifth Amendment right to equal protection of the law?”

REASONING: This is the main body of your brief. In it, you will summarize how the court analyzes the legal issue(s) presented by this case. You must address all the claims discussed by the court. For each claim (this should correspond to each of the issues in the prior section), first state the general principle of law that is involved and then explain how the court applied the facts of this case to the law. Describe the steps of logic the court went through to reach a conclusion, as well as any public policy determinations the court may have made along the way. Note any standards the court may have used to decide between contending positions. Repeat this process for each claim.

RULE: This is the new rule of law that comes from this case. It is not the court’s holding, e.g. “Judgment for plaintiff.” Rather, it is the legal principle that this case establishes that can be applied to future cases. Another way of looking at the rule is that it answers the question stated in the issue section.