Legal
Writing Class Notes
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.