How to Write a Legal Brief Using the Gault Decision as an Example

When writing a legal brief, you want to use the court's citation as your title. Example: In Re Gault 1967 387 U. S. 1, 87 S. Ct. 1428, 18 L. Ed.2d 527. This is to allow the reader to refer back to the original case if necessary. Now the typical purpose of writing a legal brief is for use in court, the legal brief tells you about the case, what happened, what was the courts decision; this allows the defense attorney and the prosecutor a quick reference guide to help drive a point to the judge in your favor.

For the purpose of this legal brief is to be able to understand what to look for in a court case, what changes were made, how society was affected, and to learn about the court system. This does not mean it can not be used as a legal brief for use in court, it is the same outcome just from a different perspective. Now most legal briefs are limited to one page per court case, the Gault Decision on the other hand is a very complex case because it has seven issues that are discussed; therefore there are seven holdings and seven rationals. The most difficult part of reading the court case is finding all of the holdings and rationals because some of them are not stated specifically. One key to writing a legal brief and to understand the court case, are the footnotes at the bottom of each page are very important.

A legal brief has five parts; facts, procedure, issues, holding, and rational. The facts section of the legal brief is first; in this section you want to state what happened (why the person is on trial and what are they on trial for). Use caution when writing this section, most people write more in this section than any other, this section should actually be the shortest. You only want to include facts that are relevant to the case.