PROJECT No. 12 Intro to Legal Research and Writing CASE LAW Briefing Court Decis

PROJECT No. 12
Intro to Legal Research and Writing
CASE LAW
Briefing Court Decisions, Part 2
To be filed on or before Monday, November 6.
INTRODUCTION
In Project 10, you prepared case briefs for Oubre v. E-Z Serve Corporation, a coffee spill
case from Louisiana, and Prince v. Parachutes, a duty to warn case from Alaska, but not involving
the spilling of hot coffee. In this project, Project 12, you will brief two more cases, McMahon v.
Bunn-O-Matic Corp., an Indiana coffee spill case from the federal court system, and Patricia R. v.
Sullivan, another duty to warn case from Alaska, but again not involving the spilling of hot coffee.
McMahon v. Bunn-O-Matic Corp., 150 F.3d 651 (7th Cir.1998)
Patricia R. V. Sullivan, 631 P.2d 91 (Alaska 1981)
Perhaps you see where we’re heading. The final project in the course, Project 18, involves
drafting a memorandum to be filed in a court case involving injury to a lady who spilled a cup of hot
McDonald’s coffee on her bare legs. The issue is whether a vendor of hot beverages has a duty
to warn a purchaser of such a beverage that it is hot and could cause injury if spilled?
Instead of cramming all of your research in preparation for your memorandum into the final
few days before the memorandum is due to be filed, which is not until December 18, you are wisely
spreading your preparation time out over several weeks. By December 18, you will have a case
brief for seven cases which you will use:
Oubre and Prince from Project 10;
McMahon and Patricia R. from Project 12;
Ross Laboratories v. Thies which I briefed for you in the “Instructor’s Notes” for Project 10;
Holowaty v. McDonald’s Corp. which I am briefing for you in the “Instructor’s Notes” for this
project, Project 12; and
The “wharfinger” duty-to-warn case from Alaska which I challenged you in Project 11 to
remember and include in your final project.
When you start drafting your memorandum a few weeks from now you will already have
much of your research completed, and after the next project, when you will learn how to
“Shepardize” cases, you will have access to some more. But most important, you will have the
important parts of several cases outlined in a one or two page case brief. There will be no need to
go back and read the dozens of pages involved in the court opinions in each of the seven cases.
In Project 10, I asked you to follow a format for briefing a case which I learned in law school
and have used ever since. In a few sentences you outlined four items: the Facts of the case; the
Proceedings, how the case proceeded through the trial and appellate courts; the Holding(s) (rule
or rules of law you can derive from the case); and a Discussion of the rationale used by the court
to arrive at its decision. There is another format commonly used to brief a court case and I want to
introduce it to you in this project, mostly because it is used by Professor Waters in PLS 285,
“Advanced Legal Writing,” which many of you will take. The format is called the IRAC method,
which again stands for four facets of the case being briefed: Issue, Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion.
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