Background

In 1773 a group of Philadelphia's most powerful investors organized as the Illinois-Wabash Company sent its agents William Murray and Louis Viviat into the Illinois country to purchase land from the Indians residing there. Defying a royal proclamation of 1763 that had barred all land purchases by English subjects from the Indians, they relied instead on a 1757 opinion by English Attorney General Charles Pratt (later knighted as the first Earl Camden, when appointed Lord Chancellor) and Solicitor General Charles Yorke. This opinion, better known as "Camden-Yorke," is referred to as that of "Pratt and Yorke" in Johnson, where it provides one legal argument for the plaintiff s claim. The plaintiff s lawyer was Daniel Webster, already one of the nation's most influential and famous attorneys.

Briefing this case

To "brief' a case is to summarize the competing legal issues and how they are resolved. Many different methods exist for briefing cases, but the sort you will be looking at here requires you to answer five major questions:

1. What is the name of the case, that date, the court that decided it, and the justice who wrote the opinion? This case involves a unanimous decision -typical of the Court under that Chief Justiceship - but there can be dissenting opinions or concurring opinions as well. This task is the easy part, but it is important because it puts the case in a general historical context, describes where the case began, and reveals who won at the lower court. Who is the "appellant" asking the court to review and reverse the decision that had gone in favor of the "appellee"?
2. What are the facts of the case? This gets a little trickier, because the report contains only those facts that are material; i.e., those facts that make a difference legally and thus bear on the outcome of the case. Because this is an appellate decision, the facts have already been established at the lower (trial court) level, and are only recited here. What facts do the parties present here, and why do they include what might seem trivial ones such as the value of the purchase exceeding $2,000?
3. What are the legal issues? In other words, what legal principles are being argued? On what rights does each party base its claim, and what does it ask the court to do? This gets trickier yet, because it requires you to identify what legal issues each party has asked the court to accept in support of its claim. These might be statute law (federal, state, or local, and could involve the interpretation or "construction" of the statute), unwritten common law, broad constitutional principles, specific constitutional provisions, the law of nations, or even natural law. Which of these is pleaded here?
4. What is the court's holding? In other words, what is the outcome of the case?
5. What is the court's rationale? In other words, what is its reasoning? What principles does it accept or reject? What legal doctrine or policy does it express?