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Legal briefs include all materials related to a case. To create them, they require attention to detail, intensive research, and excellent writing skills. This video explores the basic components of a legal brief: 1. Introduction 2. Legal Authorities 3. Facts of the Case 4. Argument, and 5. Conclusion. Viewers are presented with an actual case that reviews all five components to better illustrate the components.

Of all the skills that are necessary for a paralegal to master, perhaps none is more important than the ability to write clear, concise, and accurate communications. Whether writing a memo to a colleague, a brief for a partner in a firm, or a document that may be presented in court, good writing shows how one thinks, the standards one sets, and overall competence.

In Point Taken, Ross Guberman delves into the work of the best judicial opinion-writers and offers a step-by-step method with practical and provocative examples to assist anyone involved in drafting opinions to improve his or her writing skills.

The Supreme Court receives a record number of amicus curiae briefs and cites to them with increasing regularity. Amicus briefs have also become influential in determining which cases the Court will hear. It thus becomes important to ask: Where do these briefs come from? The traditional tale describes amicus briefs as the product of interest-group lobbying. But that story is incomplete and outdated. Today, skilled and specialized advocates of the Supreme Court Bar strategize about what issues the Court should hear and from whom they should hear them. They then \"wrangle\" the necessary amici and \"whisper\" to coordinate the message. The result is orchestrated and intentional—the product of what we call \"the amicus machine.\" This Article has two goals: The first is to offer a new description of the origin of many Supreme Court amicus briefs, explaining how it is that the Justices and the advocates benefit from this choreographed amicus process. Second, we make the perhaps surprising claim that the amicus machine is normatively desirable. Others have warned about the influence of the powerful lawyers of the Supreme Court Bar generally. While acknowledging these risks, we argue that—when it comes to amicus briefs—the benefits of specialization outweigh the costs.

Good legal writing wins court cases. It its first edition, The Winning Brief proved that the key to writing well is understanding the judicial readership. Now, in a revised and updated version of this modern classic, Bryan A. Garner explains the art of effective writing in 100 concise, practical, and easy-to-use sections. Covering everything from the rules for planning and organizing a brief to openers that can capture a judge's attention from the first few words, these tips add up to the most compelling, orderly, and visually appealing brief that an advocate can present. In Garner's view, good writing is good thinking put to paper. \"Never write a sentence that you couldn't easily speak,\" he warns-and demonstrates how to do just that. Beginning each tip with a set of quotable quotes from experts, he then gives masterly advice on building sound paragraphs, drafting crisp sentences, choosing the best words (\"Strike pursuant to from your vocabulary.\"), quoting authority, citing sources, and designing a document that looks as impressive as it reads. Throughout, he shows how to edit for maximal impact, using vivid before-and-after examples that apply the basics of rhetoric to persuasive writing. Filled with examples of good and bad writing from actual briefs filed in courts of all types, The Winning Brief also covers the new appellate rules for preparing federal briefs. Constantly collecting material from his seminars and polling judges for their preferences, the second edition delivers the same solid guidelines with even more supporting evidence. Including for the first time sections on the ever-changing rules of acceptable legal writing, Garner's new edition keeps even the most seasoned lawyers on their toes and writing briefs that win cases. An invaluable resource for attorneys, law clerks, judges, paralegals, law students and their teachers, The Winning Brief has the qualities that make all of Garner's books so popular: authority, accessibility, and page after page of techniques that work. If you're writing to win a case, this book shouldn't merely be on your shelf--it should be open on your desk.

Modern liberal democracies typically depend on courts with the power of constitutional review to ensure that elected officials do not breach their constitutional obligations. The efficacy of this review, however, can depend on the public observing such breaches. One resource available to many of the world's constitutional courts to influence the public's ability to do so is public oral hearings. Drawing on the comparative judicial literature on separation of powers, public awareness, and noncompliance, I develop a formal model of public oral hearings. The model provides empirical implications for when a court will hold public oral hearings and how hearings correspond to a court's willingness to rule against elected officials. An empirical analysis of hearings at the German Constitutional Court supports the model's prediction that courts use hearings as a resource to address potential noncompliance.

Interest groups often make their preferences known on cases before the U.S. Supreme Court via amicus curiae briefs. In evaluating the case and related arguments, we posit that judges take into account more than just the number of supporters for the liberal and conservative positions. Specifically, judges’ decisions may also reflect the relative power of the groups. We use network position to measure interest group power in U.S. Supreme Court cases from 1946 to 2001. We find that the effect of interest group power is minimal in times of heavily advantaged cases. However, when the two sides of a case are approximately equal in the number of briefs, such power is a valuable signal to judges. We also show that justice ideology moderates the effect of liberal interest group power. The results corroborate previous findings on the influence of amicus curiae briefs and add a nuanced understanding of the conditions under which the quality and reputation of interest groups matter, not just the quantity.

In an article previously published by the APSR, Carrubba, Gabel, and Hankla claim that the decision making of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has been constrained—systematically—by the threat of override on the part of member state governments, acting collectively, and by the threat of noncompliance on the part of any single state. They also purport to have found strong evidence in favor of intergovernmentalist, but not neofunctionalist, integration theory. On the basis of analysis of the same data, we demonstrate that the threat of override is not credible and that the legal system is activated, rather than paralyzed, by noncompliance. Moreover, when member state governments did move to nullify the effects of controversial ECJ rulings, they failed to constrain the court, which continued down paths cleared by the prior rulings. Finally, in a head-to-head showdown between intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism, the latter wins in a landslide.

Each year the public, media, and government wait in anticipation for the Supreme Court to announce major decisions. These opinions have shaped legal policy in areas as important as healthcare, marriage, abortion, and immigration. It is not surprising that parties and outside individuals and interest groups invest an estimated $25 million to $50 million a year to produce roughly one thousand amicus briefs to communicate information to the justices, seeking to impact these rulings. Despite the importance of the Court and the information it receives, many questions remain unanswered regarding the production of such information and its relationship to the Court's decisions. Persuading the Supreme Court leverages the very written arguments submitted to the Court to shed light on both their construction and impact. Drawing on more than 25,000 party and amicus briefs led between 1984 and 2015 and the text of the related court opinions, as well as interviews with former Supreme Court clerks and attorneys who have prepared and led briefs before the Supreme Court, Morgan Hazelton and Rachael Hinkle have shed light on one of the more mysterious and consequential features of Supreme Court decision-making. Persuading the Supreme Court offers new evidence that the resource advantage enjoyed by some parties likely stems from both the ability of their experienced attorneys to craft excellent briefs and their reputations with the justices. The analyses also reveal that information operates differently in terms of influencing who wins and what policy is announced. Using those original interviews and quantitative analyses of a rich original dataset of tens of thousands of briefs, with measures built using sophisticated natural language processing tools, Hazelton and Hinkle investigate the factors that influence what information litigants and their attorneys provide to the Supreme Court and what the justices and their clerks do with that information in deciding cases that set legal policy for the entire country.