The purpose of reading a court opinion is to understand the holding of the case.  That provides the substantive meaning of the case.  Understanding the holding of a case is essential for the student to master the substantive development of constitutional doctrine.  That permits students to analyze cases carefully and soundly.  In some cases, the holding is apparent and self-evident from the way the court opinion is written, but in other circumstances it is buried in wordy logic and extraneous material particularly in older, 19th century cases.  In addition, for some cases holdings may be “buried in the footnotes.”  In some cases there are several issues or legal questions, each with a separate holding that needs to be parsed from a careful reading.  It is important to note that the holding in a case should be stated as narrowly as possible and it must derive from the question(s) posed for decision.  Everything that the court opinion contains IS NOT the holding, and a good deal of the logic or reasoning presented by the Court in the opinion is obiter dictum (a digression or a discussion of side or unrelated points).  Analytic skill helps to sort out the narrow holding in the case and to separate it from the dicta.
      One "problem" that many undergraduate students have with this issue of the "holding" versus dicta is the habit they have of quoting items (in this case quoting one or more sentences) from an opinion as if these were the holding or the essential point of the case.  Most times that kind of indiscriminate quoting is very wrong.
      The holding can be stated in very general and broad language, or it can be narrowed down to the very specific facts in the case.  It is important for students to recognize that the best, initial approach to developing their skills in this regard is to develop the ability to state holdings just as narrowly as possible.  This is counter-intuitive because we usually “paint with the broadest possible brush.”  However, students should be very careful about the statement of the holding in a case, and while students will become facile in developing the holdings, they should never forget that a holding can be manipulated and modified to fit the needs of a particular party.  The “safest” approach to developing and using the holding of any case is a narrow holding.  Such skill is a very important first step in the development of the analytic abilities that students must develop.
     The initial step in developing the holding is to determine what question(s) the Supreme Court treats or addresses in the court opinion.  Your first reading of the case should be to discover what the question(s) in the case is(are).  You should phrase the question(s) so that the answer(s) can be developed in simple yes/no terms.  Thus, look for the question(s), then phrase that is terms of yes/no, answer(s) the question(s), so that you can develop the holding in the case.  Then you should be able to develop the holding in the case.
    There are a set of preliminary questions that are often overlooked by courts because they do not need to be addressed.  However, the first question always is Does the Court have jurisdiction to decide the case?  A court cannot proceed without jurisdiction over the person or persons in the case and without the authority to decide the case.  The next set of preliminary questions to be decided is whether the issue is Ripe or Moot.  Then there is the question of whether the party bringing the action has standing to sue.  These issues are treated in Ch. 2 of O'Brien and these concepts should be learned and understood by students.  Always look for these issues in a case, and make certain you understand why each of these questions is or is not a problem in the case.
     The substantive (and the procedural) questions in a case arise out of the facts in the case.  Each case is really a story involving people, actions, statutes or other laws, and problems that arise as a result of these things.  It is essential to read cases looking carefully for the facts or the story that for the basis or the grounding for the legal questions in the case.  While you may not be called on to recite the story or the facts in a case during class discussion, you must know those since they are the context from which the legal questions emerge.  The wording of the statute in question, the events and sequence of those acts, along with the damages or impact of those events, and “who said what to whom” are important to your understanding of the case and the holding.  Before you brief a case you must know the relevant facts of the case well.  The facts of the case that are important are NOT necessarily the whole story of the case, but rather the facts to look for is(are) the essential factual point(s) that generate(s) the legal question(s) under consideration.
    Once you have developed the question in the case, then your answer to that involves the core holding in the case.  The only remaining, but important, feature of briefing a case is to prepare a paragraph or more than clearly explains and outlines the sequence of the court's reasoning for reaching the holding.  The WHY question is an essential feature of understanding the case and developing your analytic skills in connection with each case.
     This sequence of holding, question(s), and facts is backwards.  The end objective of your reading of an opinion is the holding.  Thus, what you need to do when you read a court opinion is develop an understanding of the (1) facts, formulate the (2) question(s) in the case, and then develop the (3) holding.  So while the preceding discussion is backwards, it still emphasizes the end objective or result – the holding in the case and the development of constitutional doctrine.

Cases presented in casebooks have been edited and shortened by the editor (O'Brien) in order to provide the students with the narrowest and most central features of the Court’s decision and holding.  You should realize that O'Brien's objective is to provide you with a piece (a case) that relates to the general topic of the chapter or the section of the chapter.  In some instances, the case cut may not even contain the holding in the case.  The facts are often contained in an introductory paragraph written by the case editor and designed to give the reader a quick, accurate outline of the story, or even the issues and questions in the case.  Then the excerpted case presents the Court’s reasoning, designed to justify its holding in the case.  Developing the skills to read and understand a court opinion requires close attention to detail, quick and accurate verbatim reading, and careful phrasing of questions, issues, and the holding.  That may require reading the full or the entire opinion rather than just the case cut.

    Students are always free, encouraged, to consult the full Court opinion in any case.  If you have the legal citation to the case (these are supplied by the Casebook editor), you can examine the original, full opinion by consulting the Lawyer’s Edition of the Supreme Court Reports in the Reference Section of the HSSE Library in STEWART CENTER.  You may also find recent volumes of the Supreme Court Reports since 1974 in the HSSE Library (or in the HICKS Depository).  You can also use Lexis-Nexis to find and read the full opinion in a cases, or print out your own copy of that.  To find a case, always begin with the citation.  Students are encouraged to examine full court opinions at various times in order to “see” what full opinions look like, and to gain additional information about a specific case. 

    In addition to consulting the original documents in Supreme Court cases, students may also be asked to read the original wording of relevant statutes.  These (called the United States Code or U.S. C.) can also be found in the Reference Section of the HSSE Library.  You will have to know the citation to the U.S.C. or the United States Code.  That citation includes a title number (which is a one or two digit number between 1 and 50), then "U.S.C." followed by a section (§) number.  Thus a legitimate citation would be 5 U.S.C. § 553.   Without the citation,  you will have to use the index to the Code to find the relevant portions of the statute.  Lexis-Nexis alsohas the capability to provide full text of statutes, although this version of statutes is cumbersome and confusing.

    A valuable way of developing these analytic skills is to brief cases.  That is, write out a "brief" for the case.  Briefing is time consuming, but students will become efficient at it through practice.  Student should be able to answer the following questions about each case when they have finished briefing it:

1. What are the facts in this case?  (This includes the precise wording of the Constitutional or statutory provisions involved in the case.)
2. What issue(s) or question(s) is(are) raised by these facts for the Court to decide?
3. What answer(s) did the Court give to the issue(s) or question(s)?
4. What reasoning did the Court provide to justify or support its answer(s)?
5. What countervailing or dissenting arguments could be or were made by members of the Court for different conclusions (i.e., answers) or different justifications for the answers arrived at?
6. [What hypothetical or “next questions” does this case leave for decision?]

Students should develop their briefs of cases with these points in mind and be prepared to discuss a case in terms of ANY of these questions.  Certainly their written briefs should contain these components in concise clear, understandable (useable) form.  If that is done, then hypothetical questions or different factual assumptions (#6 above) can be discussed and the case used as precedent to develop answers to these potential questions in class.
     This kind of analysis of each case will also permit the student to understand the development of doctrine over time.  The variations in holdings, reasoning, and facts that emerge from reading cases this way facilitate discussions of trends in doctrinal development.  It will also permit students to “see” how court reasoning evolves or changes from case to case or over time as circumstances and questions change.  Thus, the textual analysis that emerges from this analytic effort is central to the understanding of the Supreme Court as a political and a legal institution.  It is also essential to comprehending the development of constitutional doctrine and precedent.

 Students should note that a brief contains several different types of writing.  The facts are descriptive summaries of the events, actors, and issues that arose in the case.  This paragraph of each brief should be tight and succinct but complete.  There will be times during class discussion when factual questions about the case will be essential to the rest of the discussion of the case.  Students must develop the skill to gather the facts in the case and have those readily available during class discussions throughout the semester.

 The legal questions posed in the case require students to write tight and focused questions that capture the essential issue(s) that are raised in the case.  This question-drafting task is much more important than most students expect, but it is clear that the Court will pay some attention to the way legal questions are formulated and either answer those questions or re-formulate the question in a way that yields the result the majority of the Justices want to address.  This is an important feature of writing.  Students should not expect that question formulation requires complex and convoluted wording.  Direct and coherent questions that can be answered dichotomously, “yes” or “no,” are likely to serve as the best vehicles for understanding the case, developing narrow holdings, and driving class discussion.

 The last, important feature of the brief, involves the legal reasoning and analysis of the case.  This requires students to be able to follow the reasoning the Court provides in the opinion to justify its decision in a case.  Analysis is generally straightforward, although some justices do not write particularly clearly or directly, and they sometimes mix several forms of legal reasoning in their opinions.