"... if, you know, you're not into the whole brevity thing."

After a whole week and a half of class, my scholastic career has pretty much come down to one thing alone: the case brief. Studying the law is typically centered around reading cases that represent the topic at hand out of a case book, a collection of cases read for their pedagogical value. Cases can be anywhere from two pages up, but usually never get past the ten page mark. It is their contents, not their length, which hides their inherent difficulty; to the point of creating and proliferating a term known by legal technicians and those unfortunate souls who must deal with them as "legalese".

The Socratic Method is a teaching style that offers only questions. After one does the reading, it is expected that one will be prepared in such a manner that, when asked said questions, one will be able to stumble through something that suffices as a response (albeit not a correct one, usually). Luckily, we are given an extraordinary tool with which to organize the case in a quickly retrievable way: the case brief.

The brief form is as follows:
Issue: What the court is deciding.
Facts: Relevant facts which determine the outcome of the case.
Rule: Rule or Rules, in the form of statutes, precedents, or other relevant dictum.
Holding: What the court decided.
Reasoning: The logical way in which the court applied the rules, or derived a new rule, from the relevant facts.

Its both a tedious and exciting experience. On the one hand, briefing between five and twelve cases a night can be extremely boring. On the other hand, it is already apparent to me that my skills at reading cases and writing have been sharpened by this experience. In this way, law school is analagous to hitting a rock face with a sledge hammer. Hit it long enough, with the correct amount of tenacity and diligence and it will be just another barrier destroyed in your wake.