How to Brief a Court Case—a Look at Feist v. Rural Telephone

This year’s topic, centered around strengthening intellectual property rights (IPR), is arguably the most legally complex subject high school policy debate has tackled in its entire history. Intellectual Property is a class usually taken by second and third year law students. As a subfield of law, it boasts its own professional association, the American Bar Association’s second oldest dedicated section, and even a specialized court—the Court of Federal Claims—created to take complicated IP cases off the plates of generalist judges. There is even a dedicated bar exam for patent lawyers. As one 800-page introduction to Intellectual Property law put it:

Even within the topics that are covered… we will not cover the complexities of trademark damages and injunctions, international trademark practice or the fine detail of the ways that Federal and state trademark law interact. Copyright law is full of highly specialized provisions—applying special rules to cable television stations or music licenses, for example… Similarly, patent law is an enormously complex field; there are entire courses just on the details of patent drafting, for example, and there is a separate “patent bar” exam for registered patent attorneys and agents. This class will touch only on the basics of patentable subject matter, and the requirements of utility, novelty, and non-obviousness.

Fortunately, this also means you are not alone. Generation after generation of stressed out law students has found themselves in the very same place you find yourself now, wondering how on earth they are going to keep all of these complicated legal ideas straight in their heads. Over the years, they have come up with a tried, true, and simple way to organize information about cases, taking even the most complicated legal opinions and making their core takeaways easy to digest for later reference.

This method is called the case brief.

In this post, we’ll go over what briefing a case means, the basics of how to brief a case, and how to organize your case briefs. My guide is directly based on Introduction to the Study of Law: Cases and Materials by Michael Makdisi & John Makdisi, though the guidelines in that text mirror many other guides on case briefing. Then, we’ll brief an important case on the topic so that you can use this method on your own in the future.

Over the course of the year, I will brief a variety of cases that are important to the topic in hopes of providing useful debate-relevant background information. However, I would strongly encourage you to go through the motions of constructing your own briefs for cases that directly implicate your core arguments on the topic. This will help you build familiarity, organize your own thoughts, and enable you to maintain notes that are tailored to the takeaways you are most personally interested in.

How to Brief a Case

The goal of briefing a case is to give you a quick reference where you can look up the important aspects of a case as you read—so, our first step is to figure out the most important components of a court decision. There are four elements that ought to be included in any brief:

1. The facts of the case. What was the case called? Who were the parties? What happened leading up to the disagreement?
2. The issues of the case. What is in dispute? What are the legal questions the case poses?
3. The holding of the case. What is the legal rule that was applied to determine the outcome of the case? This section will directly respond to the questions in the ‘issues’ section.
4. The rationale for the holding. Why did the court reach the holding that it reached?

Beyond these four, a few additional sections could be helpful for thinking about debate research.

1. Are these results current? You won’t be able to tell this immediately from reading a case. However, it’s good to reserve this as a section for future reference, since you may encounter future cases that overwrote parts of the law from the case you’re briefing now.
2. Is there anything else relevant to know? Keep track of how the case intersects with any arguments you are researching. In particular, I would recommend writing down vocabulary words you encounter in your reading.

Of these sections, those concerning the holding and rationale are the most important. While everything a judge says is, in some way, connected to their rationale, not everything they say is important to include in a brief. Judges will frequently discuss many issues that are not critical to their decision, since their goal in writing a decision is to convince the world they reached the correct conclusion, not solely to set out a pure legal principle. Look for the key components of their decision—the aspects of the decision without which the holding could not be understood. Your briefs should be brief—no more than one page long.

Many court decisions will start with an abridged section called the syllabus, which provides an authoritative summary of the issues in the case. Where a syllabus is available, it will serve as a valuable guide, especially to the factual background issues in any given case. In the brief below, you will notice that many sections very directly mirror the language in the syllabus. This can make briefing a breeze! However, make sure to read the rest of the case to capture all relevant details if the case is critical to one of your arguments. Oyez (pronounced ‘oh-yay’) also provides a variety of useful information about Supreme Court cases.

Case Brief #1—Feist Publications Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc.

You might think it is odd that we are starting with an insignificant copyright case on telephone company directories. On the contrary, this case serves as the point of departure for quite a substantial literature base with direct bearing on both one of the largest topic affs AND one of the largest neg functional limits. Can you figure out why? 👀

You can find the full decision here, if you’d like to follow along. Let’s get into it!

1. FACTS

Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. (1991)

Rural Telephone is a public utility that serves several communities in northwest Kansas, which publishes a telephone directory. Rural Telephone obtains data from its subscribers. Feist Publications is a publishing company which publishes directories covering a much wider area than Rural Telephone. Rural Telephone refused to license its data to Feist. Feist extracted listings from Rural Telephone’s directory, and included them in its own without consent. Rural Telephone sued Feist for infringing its copyright.

1. ISSUES
   1. Are telephone directories copyrightable?
2. HOLDING
   1. No. Telephone directories are insufficiently original to merit copyright protection.
3. RATIONALE
   1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution limits copyright protection to original works, which requires independent creation plus a ‘modicum of creativity.’ The Copyright Act of 1976 restricts protection to ‘original works of authorship.’ Compilations are only copyrightable if ‘selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.’
   2. Facts are not copyrightable. This principle is foundational to copyright law. Compilations/expressions of facts can be copyrightable, but only if the compilation/expression is original as described above.
   3. A telephone directory does not meet this bar, since Rural Telephone’s publication involved no curation of listings, merely collection and alphabetical arrangement. Originality is a low bar—presentation need not be ‘innovative’ or ‘surprising,’ but cannot be ‘so mechanical… as to require no creativity whatsoever.’ Assembling telephone numbers into an alphabetical directory is a mechanical, not creative act.
   4. Overturned the ‘sweat of the brow’ test, which inappropriately extended copyright protection to collections of facts and required alleged infringers to assert as a defense that they had independently created their collection.
4. CURRENT?
   1. TBD!
5. NOTES
   1. Spells out requirements to win an infringement case: “To establish infringement, two elements must be proven: (1) ownership of a valid copyright, and (2) copying of constituent elements of the work that are original. See Harper & Row, 471 U.S. at 471 U. S. 548.” Here, (1) is not contested, since the directory as a whole is concededly copyrightable. Only (2), the copying of constituent original elements, is at issue.
   2. Not essential to the case, but the court notes ‘in passing’ that Rural did not choose to publish the telephone book since it was required to do so as a condition of its monopoly utility franchise. This may be important for determining whether there is creative activity.

Important Cases on the Topic

As you dive into topic research, you are likely to encounter a variety of important cases. Below is a—far from exhaustive—list to get you started!

• Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International
• Oracle v. Google
• Ass’n for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc.
• In re Bell
• Kimberly-Clark v. Johnson & Johnson
• Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios, Inc.
• eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C.
• Computer Associates v. Altai, Inc.
• Gayler v. Wilder
• In re Cruciferous Sprout Litigation
• In re Fisher

One concluding note: you will not be able to (and should not try to!) generate a case brief for every case that affects your aff area. I would mostly suggest working backwards—identify an area of law you’d like to explore, see what case names keep cropping up, and brief those, aiming to develop a deeper understanding of what is going on.

Happy briefing!