Studying & Case Briefing
These are the four skills that carry the first year: reading a case, briefing it, taking notes in class, and studying so all of that work actually shows up on the exam. Nobody walks in knowing how to do this, and the people who look like they do mostly just started a few weeks earlier than everyone else.
Get these down early and the rest of law school gets noticeably easier. Put them off and you spend the whole semester feeling behind. Here is how I learned to do each one.
Everything below is split into the four moves you repeat every single week. Use the tabs to jump to whichever one you need right now, or read them in order the way the semester throws them at you.
Almost everything in law school starts with reading cases, and you read them differently than you read anything in college. A judicial opinion is not a story you absorb once and move on from. It is an argument you take apart. You are not trying to remember every fact. You are trying to pull out the rule the case stands for and understand how the court got there.
What a case actually is
A case in your textbook is usually an edited appellate opinion. A court is resolving a dispute, and along the way it announces or applies a rule of law. Your job is to find that rule and the reasoning behind it, because that is what gets tested and what you will use to argue the next problem. Read every case looking for these parts:
- The facts that mattered
- Not every detail, just the ones the court leaned on to decide. The test I use: which facts, if you changed them, would have changed the outcome? Those are the ones that matter.
- Procedural posture
- How the case got to this court and what the court below did. Whether the court is reviewing a motion to dismiss, a verdict, or an appeal shapes everything about how it decides.
- The issue
- The precise legal question the court is answering, usually phrased as a yes-or-no question.
- The holding
- The court's answer to that question, and the rule it announces or applies.
- The reasoning
- Why the court ruled the way it did. This is the heart of the case, because the reasoning is what you stretch to cover new facts later.
A method that keeps you awake
Reading opinions cold, front to back, is how you fall asleep on page two. Here is the order that kept me actually following the argument:
Skim first
Read the first and last paragraphs and the headings before you read the whole thing. Knowing where the opinion is going makes the middle far easier to follow.
Read actively
Mark the issue, the holding, and the key facts as you go. Note where the reasoning turns. Talking back to the opinion in the margin keeps you from glazing over.
Hunt for the rule
Somewhere the court states the legal test or principle it is applying. Find it, and rewrite it in your own words. If you cannot put it in plain language, you have not understood it yet.
Split holding from dicta
The holding is what the court actually decided. Dicta are side comments that were not necessary to the decision. Both can be useful, but only the holding binds, so know which is which.
For the first few weeks you will hit unfamiliar terms constantly, and looking up every single one slows you to a crawl. That is normal. Keep a legal dictionary close, learn the terms of art that keep coming back, and trust that the reading speeds up fast. The first read is about the structure of the court's reasoning, not mastering every word on the page.
It is tempting to highlight half the page, but a case is worth reading for what it teaches you to do with the next set of facts. When you finish one, you should be able to say in a sentence or two what rule it stands for and why. If you can do that, you read it well, even if you have forgotten the parties' names by next week.