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.