Briefs Revisited
My understanding and use of briefing keeps changing.
There are two main purposes that I’m finding for briefing. One is that briefing a case helps you remember it. Reading a case once or twice might not drive it home. Writing about it and pulling out the facts and subtleties forces you to think through it. Your understanding of the case will grow after you brief it and might even be different versus your understanding of the case after just reading it.
The second is that it serves as a good crib sheet for when you’re called on in class. I seem to have a lot less anxiety about this than most, but when I am called on, I’d prefer to have the case well-organized in front of me rather than having to flip pages trying to find the holding or some obscure but critical piece of reasoning.
Briefs are also supposed to be useful when studying for finals, but obviously I haven’t gotten there yet.
Having said all of that, I’ve stopped briefing for one class. The prof assigns a large number of cases but rarely discusses any at more than a surface level. For his class, I’m using the book-briefing technique, which is to write the brief into the text book. I use different color highlighters to distinguish facts, issue, rule, etc., and write other notes as needed directly on the pages. This should save a great deal of time.
For the other class, the prof goes deep on each case. I’ll continue briefing in that class and will be doing so more carefully.