How should a legal argument be organized?
You always want to start a legal argument with the legal rule or
standard that you are arguing applies in a given situation. In this
assignment, that means laying out the Agostini test (posted on the
Classroom Materials page) and then introducing your first argument
which should relate to the first part of the test you are arguing is
not satisfied (for Miller) or is satisfied (for the state). Other
arguments should also track the order in which they are presented in
the test (arguments related to the first effect factor should come
before arguments related to the second effect factor.) This
organization, using the Agostini test as the organizing principle
for your writing assignment (or presenting any other legal
argument), makes the argument easier for the reader to follow which
is a principal goal of legal writing.
You should start an argument with a very general introduction of the
argument, for example, "The State of Northeast will argue that it
has a secular purpose for creating the SCSF." Next, you want to
develop the argument one step further by specifying what facts in
your case support that argument. In the case of the State's secular
purpose argument that would mean you should specify what the secular
purpose is for creating the Fund as described in the facts of the
hypothetical problem. Only after you apply the legal standard to the
facts of your case should you rely on other cases to support your
conclusions. It will then be clear to the reader that you are using
a case to support a specific legal argument that you have presented.
This use of related cases is an example of reasoning by analogy.
If you instead started an argument by describing other decisions and
then turned to the current case, the reader would be reading about
the other decisions without already understanding how that case is
connected to the current one. That would mean the reader would have
to read about the other decision, then read about the connection to
the current case, and then go back to the other case in order to
make sure there is an appropriate connection between the two. You
always want to present legal arguments to avoid this kind of
rereading.
You would use this general organization for each separate legal
issue. In addition, clarity is improved when each separate argument
is presented in a separate paragraph. This means you should bring
closure to an argument before starting your next argument in a new
paragraph. Techniques like labeling sections (as with the number of
the question answered) and separate paragraphs for each argument are
part of the effort to make it as easy as possible for the reader to
follow your legal analysis.