Case Law Technique

Hand a first-year a fifty-page Supreme Court judgment and ask what it decided, and most of them will read every word and still not be able to answer in one sentence. A judge writes to explain; a lawyer reads to extract. Case law technique is the second skill — knowing which two or three sentences in fifty pages actually bind the next case, and which are just the judge thinking out loud.

In two minutes

A judgment binds only through its ratio decidendi — the reasoning necessary to the actual decision — and everything else in it, however persuasive, is obiter dictum with no binding force.

The rest of this chapter

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