How to Write a Case Note

A case note takes one judicial decision as its subject and argues something about it. A general note or comment takes a doctrinal problem as its subject and may discuss dozens of cases. The labels are not standardized: some journals call every student piece a "Note," others reserve "Note" for the case-focused format and "Comment" for the broader piece, and a few flip the terms. Read your journal's style manual and skim the student pieces in the last three volumes before you decide what you are writing.

Length varies the same way. Case notes commonly run 5,000 to 10,000 words with 150 to 350 footnotes; general notes often run longer. Your journal will set a hard word or page cap for note selection, and exceeding it is a common reason pieces get cut before anyone reads the argument.

The one constant is the purpose. An opinion already summarizes itself, and Westlaw already headnotes it. Your piece earns its pages only by saying something the opinion does not say about itself.

Look for decisions handed down in the last twelve to eighteen months in an area that is genuinely unsettled. The best candidates share features you can spot quickly: a vigorous dissent, a concurrence that flags a question the majority ducked, a rule the court announces without explaining how lower courts should apply it, a circuit split created or deepened, or a state supreme court breaking from the majority approach.

Be wary of two traps. First, blockbuster Supreme Court cases attract dozens of student notes; if you write on one, you need a narrow, unusual angle rather than a general treatment. Second, a case still on appeal can be reversed while your piece is in production, which some journals will not risk.

Then run a preemption check before you invest weeks. Search HeinOnline full text, Westlaw and Lexis secondary-source databases, Google Scholar, SSRN, and the Legal Scholarship Network for the case name and for your argument's key terms. Check the forthcoming-articles pages of journals in the field. Many journals maintain an internal preemption database of topics claimed by other students; search it and claim your topic in writing. Bring the results to a faculty member in the field before you draft.

Your thesis must be a sentence a reasonable reader could dispute. "The Court held that the Chevron framework no longer governs" is a holding, not a thesis. "The Court's replacement standard will produce more, not less, agency discretion in technical rulemaking, because reviewing courts lack the capacity to resolve statutory ambiguity de novo" is a thesis.

Workable claim types include: the court reached the right result on the wrong reasoning; the rule the court announced is unadministrable, and here is how three foreseeable fact patterns will break it; the majority misread the precedent, statutory text, or historical record it relied on; the decision creates a split the Supreme Court should resolve in a specified way; the opinion's logic extends to a neighboring doctrine the court did not mention; or the problem needs a legislative fix you can draft.

Write the thesis as one sentence, put it in your introduction within the first three pages, and tape it above your desk. Every section that does not serve it gets cut.

The conventional five-part structure works because editors expect it. Part I, the Introduction, runs two to four pages: a concrete hook, the case and its holding, your thesis, and a roadmap. Part II, Background, runs five to ten pages and teaches the doctrinal history that made the case possible — the governing statute, the leading precedents, the circuit split. Part III, The Case, runs three to six pages: facts, procedural history, holding, the majority's reasoning, and any separate opinions. Part IV, Analysis, is the piece; it should run eight to fifteen pages, broken into subsections that each carry one sub-argument. Part V, the Conclusion, is short and does not introduce new material.

Watch the ratio. The single most common defect in student case notes is twenty-five pages of description followed by five pages of analysis. Your Analysis section should be at least as long as Background and The Case combined. If it is not, you do not yet have a thesis — you have a summary with an opinion attached.

Draft out of order. Write Part IV first, in rough form, then write Background to supply exactly the doctrine Part IV needs and nothing else.

Include only the facts your analysis uses. If your argument turns on the standard of review, the plaintiff's employment history is a sentence, not a page. Cite the opinion with pinpoints for each fact; go to the briefs or the record only if a discrepancy between the opinion's account and the record is part of your argument.

Procedural history should almost always be one paragraph: what the trial court held, what the intermediate court did and on what ground, and the basis for review. Readers of a case note are lawyers; they do not need to be told what a motion to dismiss is.

Paraphrase rather than quote. Reserve quotation for language you are going to parse word by word — the operative sentence of the new rule, the phrase the dissent attacks. Under Bluebook Rule 5.1, quotations of fifty or more words are set off as block quotes without quotation marks; a case note with three block quotes in Part III reads as padding.

Use academic Bluebook format from the white pages, not Bluepages practitioner format. That means Rule 2's typeface conventions in footnotes (large and small caps for book authors and titles, italics for article titles and case names in short forms), Rule 10 for cases with the correct jurisdictional abbreviations from Table T1 and case-name abbreviations from Table T6, Rule 12 for statutes, Rule 16 for periodicals, and Rule 18 for internet sources. Rule 1.2 governs signals, Rule 1.4 the order of authorities within a citation, Rule 4.1 <em>id.</em>, and Rule 4.2 <em>supra</em>.

A full case cite looks like <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em>, 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954); the short form after that is <em>Brown</em>, 347 U.S. at 495. For a decision not yet in a reporter, follow Rule 10.8.1 for slip opinions and pending cases; check before submission whether a reporter cite has issued.

Footnote density is high. The working rule at most journals is that every sentence asserting a fact, characterizing an authority, or restating someone else's argument carries a footnote; sentences stating your own original argument may not. Never cite a headnote, a Westlaw synopsis, or an editorial summary — cite the opinion's own text.

Save a PDF of every source the day you find it, named by footnote number. Spading is unforgiving, and reconstructing sources from memory in week ten will cost you more time than the drafting did.

Build backward from your journal's note-selection deadline. Allow two weeks for case selection and preemption checking, three to four weeks for research and a Background draft, three weeks for the Analysis draft, one week for a faculty reader, and one week for citation cleanup. The cleanup always takes longer than you plan.

During spading (also called subciting or cite-checking), editors pull every source and verify two things: that the source exists in the form you cited it, and that it actually supports the proposition in text. The recurring failures are quotations altered without brackets or ellipses in violation of Rule 5, missing pinpoint pages, and misused signals — writing <em>see</em> where the source states the proposition directly, or no signal where the source only supports it by inference.

Before you submit, hand the introduction alone to a classmate outside the field. If they cannot state your thesis back to you in one sentence, rewrite the introduction, not the rest of the piece. Even if the note is not selected for publication, it will satisfy your upper-level writing requirement at most schools and become the writing sample you send to judges and firms, so finish it properly either way.