Legal Writing Class Notes 1/29/04

 

Condensing a rule out of several rules

 

Okay!  It’s time for class!  There are some hard assignments.  Maybe we’ll be getting out early today.

 

Let’s do two exercises.  The exercise in Chapter Five, Question Three, is to synthesize the rule from several cases.  There are four cases.  Let’s pull the law out of the fact patterns and decide what general rule we’re going to use when we have a case before us.  It might be easier to do if there’s a specific case at hand.

 

In Chapter 7, we’ll do a rule explanation.  We’ll do a set of facts.  We’ll be given a case to use and we’ll try to pull the rule out of the case and just explain the rule of law.  Then we’ll apply it to particular facts.

 

We’re building one layer on top of another as to what constitutes a memo: How do you get the rule of one case?  How do you get the rule of several cases?  How do you explain that rule?  How do you apply the rule?

 

The expectation is that there will be different syntheses of the law.  It’s not exactly but we have to do it.  We take a bunch of cases and pull out those that are pertinent to a particular case.

 

Don’t analyze the same thing twice in the same memo!

 

Holding is more important than dicta.

 

Next week, we’ll get our writing assignment.  We were trying to get through the material on how to do the writing assignment before we got the writing assignment.  We’ve gotten to condensing a rule out of several rules,

 

She only grades final drafts.

 

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