App
Ad Notes
We
only have three drafts and we don’t have to start from scratch on our
research. We have lower court decisions
that we can look at and we can get our research started from those
decisions. All the homework will be
parts of doing the writing. There are
due dates that all occur at once. Be
decent on the day the paper is due. We
only have 10 meetings. You’re done with
the class by Thanksgiving. 80% of the
grade is the brief, 20% for oral argument.
That’s a big difference. Judges
in real life care more about briefs than oral argument. The brief tends to form a rebuttable
presumption that gets tested at oral argument.
The goal is to come up with a brief that doesn’t need oral argument. If you
do bad on the drafts, you lose points on the final
grade. But you want to learn stuff from
the drafts. There are 18 adjunct
sections.
You
are not allowed to look at any attorney work product relevant to the case. No attorney briefs! No amicus briefs! None from the court below! That’s not necessarily like real life,
though. We’re back in academia, and the
rules are different. We can probably do
better than the real thing in some cases.
You also can’t consult briefs online or hard copies. We can’t consult with each other until we’re
told that we can. When in doubt, ask.
We
will separate the ideal reader from the real reader. The judge doesn’t read the brief first, the
clerk does, and sometimes that’s the only
person who reads it. The judge will only
use the brief if it’s helpful. Clerks
may not be totally attentive readers. Judges
might not be that attentive either.
Regular folks will be reading the brief!
You have to write it so that they’ll get it the first time!
What’s
the significance of dead fish? Read the
book. Don’t use indented quotes in your
writing if at all possible! Why is
research like dating and writing like marriage?
Next week, we’ll find out!