[ plain | vocabulary ]

This section of the disk introduces you to the legal opinion, which lawyers and law students often refer to as a case. Your first year, you will spend a lot of time reading and analyzing cases from the appellate courts. The appellate court opinion is ground zero for law school, and in fact, casebooks contain little else. Don't expect your case books to lucidly explain legal concepts! Law school is not college, and your casebooks are not textbooks.

Think of your casebook authors as abstract impressionists. They scour the law hunting for cases that they can edit to convey one point about their subject. By combining these cases into chapters and ultimately into books, they paint a loose and hopefully accurate picture of the law. Unfortunately, these authors usually feel no need to include explanatory or introductory material about the cases.

The authors feel the case should stand on its own. The point of law the case address should be clear enough, on its face, for the student to summurize the rule and place it into proper context.

In other words, after figuring out what a case is about you must develop the skill to place the idea the opinion represents into the general body of the law you are studying. Which is, in effect, the process of outlining.

This section provides you with a sample opinion, Silver v. Starrett that you should throughly explore. It is a factually interesting opinion, as many of the cases you read your first year will be. There are two versions of the case presented here - a plain version, and a version with all of the legal vocabulary hypertexted.

Try your way through the plain reading , first. The amount of effort you put into understanding this plain reading should help you gauge how hard law school will be.

In perusing the plain, case book reading you should keep in mind your ultimate goals:

1. find the issue
2. find the rule of law the court applied
3. formulate a holding for the the opinion (i.e. explain the application of the rule to the facts)
4. understand the reasoning (i.e. the justification) of the decision
5. understand the procedural posture of the case

I know this might sound like Greek to you. It should. I suggest that you read the plain case through. Try to find the issue. Ask yourself:

The rule answers this question. The way the court applies the rule in this particular case is called the hold of the case. Another way to describe the hold is how this court answered the question.

Interestingly, the hold of the case, the way this court answered the question, itself becomes a new rule, a new law, for all future cases; this concept is called Stare Decisis. Stare Decisis means a "thing decided." All courts of lesser jurisdiction to the deciding court must follow that court's holdings.

Sometimes a court will say here are the facts; this is the rule that applies; this is the conclusion; you figure out why, that's not our job . . . Still, the court applied the rule to the facts by using some assumptions: Opinions are hopefully never arbitrary or capricious. Regardless, you must come up with some criteria by which the court reached its decision; you must formulate a principle upon which other decisions can be based. Each and every case in your casebooks "teaches" something. That something that it teaches is the hold of the case; it is the application of the rule for which the case stands.

Don't forget to look at the style of the case (the top part with the numbers and names in it). Who are the parties: Who's the plaintiff and who's the defendant. What are their names? How did the case get here? What's the name of the court? Why is the case in this court and not some other one? These are all procedural questions and there is no way to know all of the answers your first day of law school.

Next, concentrate on the vocabulary reading. You should (and probably will) read each case at least twice during your first year. To understand an opinion you must understand its language and during your first year you will spend a great deal of time looking up legal vocabulary. Here, I have provided the definitions.

During first year, you should make it a policy to look up every single word that you don't understand. Unfortunately, this essential process takes precious time you don't have.

By reading the vocabulary section you will get a feel for the amount work involved in properly analyzing a case.

The way the readings are set up - plain and vocabulary - emulates the method I use for reading cases. First, I read an opinion through to get a general feel for the issues and the litigants. Next, I look up words and phrases that I don't understand. Finally, I begin to dissect the case for its legal elements. Granted, now I do all of these tasks at once. During most of my first year, I was so lost and behind that I didn't perform any of these steps in a clear way. I encourage you to use this algorithm:

1. Read the case through
2. Look up vocabulary
3. Tease out the legal elements

If you don't like this particular system come up with a similar one of your own. You will find that these tasks form the foundation of first year law school. If you don't do each task to properly and to completion, you'll do poorly.