in this lesson we will explore the skill of case synthesis that is making sense of numerous cases that all relate to a similar issue we want to make sense of those and really impose some sort of order on them in understanding what the law is from looking at a group of cases and we'll see what i mean by this a little bit later in the lesson let's start out with cases in the wild if you will or more to the point what does a case look like in its natural habitat that is the printed case reporter now some of you may immediately say to yourself professor burge why are you talking about print case reporters i expect that most research i would do or cases i would look at would be online and that may well be true but the fact is that online legal materials are really built around emulating the experience of the original print version of the materials as a result if you understand the pieces and parts of the print version you'll have a better understanding of what even an online version looks like so let's take a look at this example at the top of the page the page on the left you'll notice the case name city of evansville versus magenheimer and in fact it's associated with a citation which is the volume and the page number and the reporter name where a particular case can be found and then the party names are given in more detail just a little bit below that docket numbers are something that are assigned to cases by courts it's sort of a unique number that only this particular case has but it's not used very much in legal research though it is useful if there is one particular case and you already know the identity of the docket number every case should also identify which court made the decision and that makes sense if you want to know who is bound by a particular case you certainly need to know where the court is located and what level the court is in so here it's the court of appeals of indiana that would be an intermediate appellate court in the state of indiana this case has a year and a date of the decision june 24th 2015 so we can see you know comparatively is this a more recent case or less recent case than another and now i want to get to something that can separate versions of cases from one another that is the editorial enhancements in the most popular version of cases the ones that are most used by lawyers there is a form that was created by the original west publishing company which is now a part of the thomson reuters company and part of what west did was add editorial content on the front side of cases to help make it easier for people who are reading through the cases to understand what's going on think of it this way if you could get a useful summary of the case and find out from there that this isn't a case that i want to deal with then you'd want to know that so you spend less time on that case and you can move on to something else the editorial summaries you should know are written by editors from the publisher they are not written by the court as a result any editorial materials in a case though they may be useful are not part of the law and they are not something that anyone should cite as being the law so here we have an editorial summary that explains what this particular case is about its factual background and the legal holdings that it is dealing with over in the right hand column of this first page we see something called a head node and above that is a section with a key number now i should be careful with key numbers that is proprietary to west publications but a lot of other research databases and engines will have something that tries to replicate the original key number system essentially a headnote is a description of one particular point of the law and so that's but again that was written by an editor it's not the case itself then above that the key number information which includes the name here it's municipal corporations that is something that the editor tried to assign to this point of law to categorize it so that it could be indexed by similar cases in other words other cases with the same topic and the same key number could all be found by one researcher in a fairly simple manner this system is not perfect but it helps a great deal in finding law that's relevant and many times attorneys will speak of finding one good case and if an attorney does find one good case that case can be used through a system like topics and key numbers to branch out into other cases that deal with the same issue so let's turn to the second page of our case example and notice at the top that we see the reporter where this opinion is published this was referenced in the citation over on the first page but on the second page we see that this case is in the north eastern reporter volume 27 specifically the third series and that's because the numbers at which they reach a certain number usually 999 of late the publisher will start over with one well this one is volume 27 and the case started on page 965 and we've continued on to page 966. northeastern simply refers to a group of states that west has assigned to this particular reporter and you should be warned that states sometimes appear in reporters that are less than intuitive let me give you my favorite example the state of oklahoma what where do you expect you would find the oklahoma cases probably not where they are which is the pacific reporter so when someone tries to sell you beachfront property in oklahoma you can ask them if it is along the pacific ocean so oklahoma is in the pacific reporter texas is in the southwestern reporter and indiana as you see is located in the northeastern reporter moving on these published cases also list the names of the attorneys of record these are the attorneys who argued the case in front of the court so that's useful and if your attorney it's kind of nice to have something to memorialize your involvement in a case at least if it's a good result you would like that so the attorneys are mentioned and below that we get the name of the judge so here it is judge baker we don't have the first name we have just the last name and notice until we get to the part that says judge baker nothing since the name has been part of the case it's been pretty much editorial enhancements but starting with the oval that says the opinion begins here this is the real case this is where the actual law is and this is where you'd want to spend quality time in studying a published case now why did we spend time on that the main reason is i don't want you to be scared away by what a legal case looks like you want to be able to deal with it and be able to understand all the pieces and parts so moving on recall that we've talked about reading cases and how to do it when reviewing a single case what lawyers typically do is they seek to extract the relevant legal rule from it now i say relevant because a given case may talk about three four five ten legal rules but you want the one that is relevant to your area of research or your area of interest so it's possible to find a legal rule from a single case and when we talked about legal analysis we saw that lawyers would try to determine how the legal rule applied to the facts of a single case and we did that with the mainframes exercise single rule single case in that instance the toad case and then going forward for predictive legal analysis a lawyer would tries to understand what the reasoning was in the original case and of course that's what's relevant for moving forward and trying to make predictions about how a court would rule in the future so far so good it's pretty easy you've got one case and one rule to deal with the new clients case but what happens if the obvious occurs and it always does what if there are multiple cases applying the same rule to multiple sets of facts and that's the normal situation there isn't just one case there's lots of cases how do we make sense of those cases and how do attorneys deal with that situation that brings us to case synthesis which is closely related to rule synthesis the goal of case and rule synthesis is to achieve consistency to be able to make a statement that would explain the results in all of a given group of cases and this is what lawyers have to do they have to compare the outcomes of several cases they could all be relevant they could be good law in the sense that they haven't been overruled for any reason and they could all involve the same legal claim but as we know different cases will have different facts arising from them they may even state the rule slightly differently what lawyers have to do is harmonize the cases and create a single consistent rule statement and that rule statement should be something that would explain or at least be consistent with the outcome in each and every one of those cases and if a complete statement of the legal rule is not consistent then that hasn't been good synthesis so the process of legal synthesis is making sense of the outcome of several different cases and this is something that lawyers have to do all the time and in this course we want to make sure that we understand that process so let's look at a real life example here we're going to take an issue and it's a legal rule about parental immunity and i'm going to ask a question that may strike you as ridiculous at first but we'll soon see that it isn't can children sue their parents and of course i'm actually not talking about uh mom took away junior's toy but there could be situations that are more serious than that one specifically as a matter of public policy we're concerned if parents commit intentional misconduct against their children perhaps injuring them and that would be something that's rather different from unintentional uh accident that happens around the house so there there are policy considerations where sometimes the law would say yes a child could sue a parent but other times no that's getting too invasive of the individual household now the situation where this most frequently comes up is when there is liability insurance at issue and a child has been injured there the child maybe with the other parent may want to nudge nudge sue the parent who is involved in an accident let's say it's an automobile accident because any injury coming from that could be recovered from the liability insurance policy maybe it's a homeowner's policy or maybe it's a car insurance policy it doesn't matter it is possible to recover for injury but the insurance company is only going to pay if there is coverage and the way we would ultimately determine coverage in the event of a refusal to pay is you guessed it a lawsuit against the alleged bad actor parent so again because when we're dealing with insurance insurance you should know does not cover intentional misconduct so you can't get insurance for assault and battery for example but insurance very much comes into play into matters of negligence so that's the type of fact pattern we are actually looking at and that courts actually deal with it's not because mom took the toy away it's because junior was in a car one of the parents was driving and then junior was injured had medical expenses and somebody perhaps the other parent wants the insurance company to foot the bill therefore the question is is the parent who is alleged to have been responsible for the accident liable as a matter of law i hope you're clear on that so let's move forward with a set of cases on parental immunity negligence we're going to go through some brief snippets of case facts and you may want to jot some notes to yourself while we're doing this and figure out how this set of just the facts could be useful first the abbot case from 1985 jack abbott sued his father joseph for negligently pouring hot liquids in the kitchen such that he burned jack in the process notice again this is a negligent suit jack in this case is 12 years old what's the holding held joseph abbott the father is immune from suit right so that's one data point moving on 1992 the black case george black sued his father paul for negligently burning him in mr black's kitchen by handing him a large hot pot once again it's negligence george however is a 24 year old businessman and is unmarried held paul black is not immune from suit right so we have an adult 24 years old and in that case it is possible for the child to sue the parent moving on the peep case bob peep sued his father larry for negligence for driving his car into bob while bob was riding his bicycle sounds pretty bad bob is 19 aha so he's an adult and a senior in high school who lives at home outcome held larry peep the father is immune from suit okay so it's not adult status that answers this right we've got two more cases and then we're going to try to synthesize these all together next up the smith case from 2003 marilyn smith sued her mother diana for negligence while riding her bicycle into maryland while marilyn was gardening marilyn is 19 years old unmarried and a part-time college student who lives at home she is not self-supporting held the mother diana smith is immune from suit hmm we may be onto something here next and finally anderson gretel anderson sued her father hans for negligence for stumbling against gretel and pushing her against the hot pottery she had just removed from the kiln gretel is 17 in other words not a legal adult married and lives in another city held hans anderson is not immune from suit okay we may be on to something where we can synthesize a rule for when a parent is or is not immune under the laws of this particular state so we need to spend a moment thinking about the traits from the cases what are some possibilities here are we dealing with negligence or intentional torts in other words intentional misconduct in all the cases we read the facts involved an accident something that could be attributed to negligence but certainly not where the parent intentionally tried to hurt the child so whatever rule we come up with it would only involve negligence cases next what about the fact that some of these uh children were minors and some of them were adults that has a surface level appeal but looking at the facts of these cases we see that being an adult doesn't seem to be the determinative status so that's something we certainly want to think about but it doesn't look like that's going to be a part of our rule we did find some reference to marriage in some of the cases but that wasn't what did it we had the one who was a businessman adult no mention of the fact that he was married so we're not really looking at the marriage status of the child now the fact that seems to stand out above all in reading through the that group of cases is dependence is the child a legal dependent regardless of age of the child and if that's the case a legal dependent appears not to be able to sue the parent so let's take that and can we synthesize a rule out of that well if and you may want to pause the video at this point and think through it could you come up with a rule that explains all five of those cases all right you ready let's take a look how about this a parent is immune from lawsuits for negligence brought by his or her child if the child is a dependent living in the parent's home that seems to explain all of the immunity case if the child is independent not living at home then and only then would a parent not be immune from a lawsuit for negligence so let's wrap this up and think about what have we learned in this lesson first of all because we're dealing with a common law system we know that lawyers have to determine an accurate and comprehensive rule based on case synthesis a statement of a rule from one case has to be able to explain the result in a second case and if the rule doesn't explain both then we need to do something to the rule because we haven't properly synthesized it next the result of proper case synthesis should be a rule statement that accounts for the results in all of the cases from which it is synthesized if it doesn't explain all the cases go back to the drawing board because something is not quite right and finally once we have a synthesized rule we have an incredible tool that can help us predict the result of new cases as they arise and that's generally what lawyers will try to do who are engaged in predictive analysis knowing what's happened in the past can we by case synthesis predict what's going to happen in the future given a specific set of facts and that brings us to the end of this lesson on case synthesis and i hope you've learned the importance of being able to craft a rule and a statement that ultimately makes sense in a large group of cases