Introductory.

• Jurisdiction: United States

Section 20. Introductory.—An appellate brief is a written argument in support of or in opposition to the order, decree, or judgment below. This part of the book explains how to write a good appellate brief. The subject may seem at first blush to be as dull as last night's dishwater, but it is a very important one indeed. When the appellate court, as frequently happens, reads briefs in advance of argument, your brief is the first step in persuasion. When a court reads briefs only after oral argument, then, if it is persuaded to decide the case your way after hearing the oral presentations, your brief becomes the peg on which it can hang its collective judicial hat. And in a close case, where the issue is uncertain and where the legal materials must be studied at considerable length, the brief becomes the factor on which the entire case will be won or lost.

This chapter covers the essentials of effective brief-writing, the next one considers helpful techniques in writing and research, and the third discusses the finer points and details of the process. It is a process that entails, in my judgment at least, a quest for perfection—a quest pursued under the pressure of deadlines and the demands of other cases, a quest perhaps foredoomed to failure by the eternal fallibility of man.

The name of the practitioner, so the scholars say, is writ in water. Certain it is that he has but few tangible mementos of his labors—his name in the reports (misspelled, likely as not) and some bound volumes of briefs on his shelves, gathering dust. (After all, briefs and the opinions they assisted in shaping and influencing represent the preservation of his professional skill.) For my part, I should like some day to write the dream brief, one wholly free from misprints and from awkward expressions, which, on rereading five years later, I would not want to change by so much as a comma (except possibly to add citations to cases subsequently decided that confirm the contentions made). To the extent that time and other...