Chapter 5 · Practice

Case Law Practice

Three judgment calls every case researcher makes: which cases are worth citing, what part of an opinion actually binds, and whether a case is still good law for your point.

Nothing here is scored or saved. Each part rewards thinking it through, then reading why — case selection especially has more than one defensible answer.

Part 1

Build the set

Your client is a tenant in the State of Franklin whose landlord won’t fix the heat. You need authority for two questions: Q1 — is there a duty to provide heat? and Q3 — what remedies does the tenant have? Tap the cases you’d cite, then reveal the weighing. The colored squares show which questions each case covers, so you can triage without reading every opinion.

Part 2

Holding or dictum?

Only the holding — what the court had to decide to resolve the case — carries precedential weight. Dictum is everything the court says along the way that it didn’t need to decide. For each passage from a (fictional) opinion, which is it?

Part 3

Still good law?

A citator flag is a prompt to investigate, not a verdict. The rule is the same each time: read the citing opinion and ask whether the treatment actually touches the point you’re citing for.