CLN 4U Unit 2 Assignment
How to Prepare a Brief
Brief Writing
Creating Case Briefs
• Legal briefs are short summaries, or abstracts, of a case writen in
your own words.
• Purpose is to expose and fully understand the purpose behind a
particular court decision.
• Your job will be to distinguish pertinent facts from less important
information.
• For this particular assignment, a simplified version of a brief will
be drafted on a particular Supreme Court case.
Brief Format
Your brief will contain six basic components:
1. Citation
1. Facts of the Case
1. Legal Issue(s)
1. Decision
1. Ratio Decidendi / Dissent
1. Analysis
Citation
Identifies the names of parties, which the court heard the case, and the
year.
Date Published
Style of cause:
Civil
First name is
plaintiff.
Martin v. Perrie, [1986] 1 S.C.R. 41 (S.C.C.)
Second name is
the defendant.
Volume 1 of the
Supreme Court
Records, page 41.
Supreme Court of
Canada.
Facts
This portion outlines what is significant in the case, and briefly
states the facts.
For this portion, your brief should contain the following:
• A clear understanding of the events which gave rise to the
litigation.
• The cases reviewed in class are edited down from their original
length.
• Most cases deal with a great many issues and include many
significant facts.
• Your job is to research and capture the most important issues.
Legal Issues
What question(s) must the court address in order to arrive at its
decision?
• Frame the issue in the form of a single question.
• The question should must simply answerable with a yes or no.
• Questions can be both narrow and broad in scope. Narrow in
scope would apply to the specific case, but can be broadly
addressed to other situations of a similar nature.
Decision
• Simply state the decision reached by the majority of the court.
Decision
What question(s) must the court address in order to arrive at its
decision?
This portion is brief, but important. This portion should follow
the format below:
• Frame the issue in the form of a single question.
• The question should must simply answerable with a yes or no.
• Questions can be both narrow and broad in scope. Narrow in
scope would apply to the specific case, but can be broadly
addressed to other situations of a similar nature.
Ratio Decidendi
Latin for “the rationale for the decision”.
• For this section, identify the rule of law used to support or
rationalize the judge's argument.
• This section generally begins by naming the judge who read the
decision.
Dissent
• Identify the arguments of the judge(s) who did not agree with the
majority opinion, if applicable.
• Note that in some cases, there is no dissenting voice.
Analysis
• In this portion, you will evaluate the significance of the case, its
relationship to other cases, its place in history, and what it 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 Judges or
Justices should be probed, the “rightness” of the decision debated,
and the logic of the reasoning considered.
• This is the student’s commentary on the case. It is NOT simply a
summary of what has already been stated elsewhere in the brief