Case Briefer
Produces detailed law-school case briefs of United States judicial opinions in a fixed...
Install
npx skills add lawve-ai/awesome-legal-skills --skill case-briefer -g -a claude-code -y- Repository
- lawve-ai/awesome-legal-skills919
- Category
- Documents
- Updated
- 16d ago
- License
- See repository
- Context cost
- Mediumabout 1,685 tokens
- Runs scripts
- No, instructions only
What it does
Produces detailed law-school case briefs of United States judicial opinions in a fixed nine-section structure: memory jogger, facts, procedural history, judicial votes, holding, opinion-by-opinion analysis, five future-application hypotheticals, critique, and verified key quotations. Also builds vote tables, cross-case consistency tables, perspective-based critiques, and LaTeX in article, Beamer and casebook-chapter formats. Use whenever someone asks to brief a case, analyse or explain an opinion, summarise a decision for students, generate hypotheticals from a holding, critique a judgment, tabulate how justices voted, or convert case analysis to LaTeX. Triggers on "brief this case", "case brief", "explain the holding", "what did the court hold", "hypotheticals based on", "critique this opinion", "vote table", "Beamer presentation", "chapter brief", and on any reference to a judicial opinion or Supreme Court decision in a teaching context. Requires web search to verify quotations, votes and holdings.
Case Briefer
Deliver detailed case briefs with comprehensive analysis, examples, and critique for law students and professors.
Core Case Brief Structure
Every case brief includes these 9 sections:
1. Memory Jogger
One sentence capturing the case's essence, its facts, central holding, or most salient feature.
- Example for Carolene Products: "Footnote 4 establishes justification for tiers of scrutiny."
2. Detailed Case Facts
Include:
- Key facts giving rise to the dispute
- Relevant statutes, regulations, or constitutional provisions
- Explain the statutory scheme and specific provisions challenged
- Historical or political context when relevant
3. Procedural History
Focus on procedural aspects relevant to disposition:
- Lower court rulings and reasoning
- Basis for appeal
- Note distinctions like "the court did not rule plaintiffs prevailed, merely that they pled enough to survive a motion to dismiss"
4. Judicial Votes
Group by:
- Majority: Author and joining justices/judges
- Concurrence(s): Author(s) and any joining justices/judges
- Dissent(s): Author(s) and any joining justices/judges
5. Holding
Succinct statement of the court's judgment and the rule announced.
6. Analysis of Opinions
For each opinion (majority, concurrences, dissents):
- Reasoning employed
- Key constitutional, statutory, regulatory, or treaty provisions cited
- Key precedents and how they were applied to this case's facts
- Logical structure of the argument
7. Examples: Future Applications
Create 5 hypotheticals showing how the rule applies:
- 2 same-side: Cases that would come out the same way as the principal case
- 2 opposite-side: Cases that would come out the opposite way
- 1 fence-sitter: Genuinely unclear outcome
For each, explain why it falls where it does under the rule.
