Study Skills: How to Write a Case Brief

A case brief is a short, structured summary of a judgment in your own words. Done well, it turns a forty-page decision into a half-page you can revise from, and it forces you to separate what the court decided from how it reasoned. This is the single highest-value habit in the first year of a law degree.

The Anatomy of a Brief

1. Citation and court

Record the case name, year, citation and the deciding court. The level of the court tells you how much weight the decision carries.

2. Material facts

Include only the facts the outcome turned on. If changing a fact would not change the result, it is probably not material, so leave it out.

3. Procedural history

One line on how the case arrived at this court and what the lower courts decided.

4. Issue

Frame the legal question as a yes or no question. A sharp issue makes the rest of the brief write itself.

5. Holding and ratio

State the answer to the issue, then the ratio decidendi: the legal reasoning that was necessary to that answer. This is the part you will cite in essays and problem questions.

6. Obiter and your note

Note any significant comments made by the way, then add one line on why the case matters and how it fits the wider topic.

A Worked Structure

Example: Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562

Facts: a consumer drank ginger beer containing a decomposed snail and fell ill; she had no contract with the manufacturer. Issue: does a manufacturer owe a duty of care to the ultimate consumer? Holding: yes. Ratio: a person owes a duty to take reasonable care to avoid foreseeable harm to their neighbour, meaning those closely and directly affected by their acts.

Common Mistakes

Briefing is not copying

Avoid transcribing the headnote. Write the ratio in your own words, cut immaterial facts, and keep the whole brief to roughly half a page. A brief you summarised is one you will actually remember.

Conclusion

Brief every case the same way and the format becomes automatic. By exam season you will have a deck of tight, reusable summaries, and a trained instinct for separating ratio from noise.