Material

Case Brief Worksheet

The paper entitled “How to Brief a Case” posted in the Course Materials offers a model to brief a court case. Read about this model in “How to Brief a Case.” Then, select a United States Supreme Court case on the First Amendment and complete a case brief using the worksheet below. The case brief should be at least 750 words in length.

SUPREME COURT case: Indicate the title and citation of the case, e.g., Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000).

FACTS: Lay out the pertinent facts of the case as they relate to the First Amendment issue. There may be other facts in the case, but you only need to discuss those that pertain to the First Amendment issue.

ISSUE: Identify the First Amendment legal issue in the case. There may be other issues depending on the case you have chosen, but you only need to discuss those that pertain to the First Amendment issue.

RULE: What provision of the First Amendment applies to the issue you have defined?

DECISION: The decision, or holding, is the court’s answer to a question presented to it for answer by the parties involved or raised by the court itself in its own reading of the case.

REASONING: Analyze the case, applying the law to the facts of the case.

ANALYSIS: Here the student should evaluate the significance of the case, its relationship to other cases, its place in history, and what is shows about the Court, its members, its decision-making processes, or the impact it has on litigants, government, or society. It is here that the implicit assumptions and values of the Justices should be probed, the “rightness” of the decision debated, and the logic of the reasoning considered.

Reference

Hall, D. E. & Feldmeier, J. P. (2012). Constitutional law: Governmental powers and individual freedoms (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.