Some opinions resolve the parties’ legal dispute by announcing and applying a clear rule of law that is new to that particular case. That rule is known as the ‘ratio decidendi’ of the case. This are often contrasted with ‘dicta’ found in an opinion.
‘Dicta’ refer to legal statements in the opinion not needed to resolve the dispute of the parties; the word is a pluralised abbreviation of the Latin phrase ‘obiter dictum’, which means ‘a remark by the way’.
When a court announces a clear a ratio decidendi, you should take some time to think about how the court’s rule would apply in other situations. Try to think of ‘hypotheticals’, (new sets of facts that are different from those found in the cases you have read). This exercise will help you to understand the significance of a legal rule and how it might apply to lots of different situations. Courts occasionally say things that are silly, wrongheaded, or confused, and you need to think independently about what judges say. Concurring and dissenting opinions often do this work for you.
Remember:
A rule might look good in one setting, but another set of facts might reveal a major problem or ambiguity.
Judges often reason by ‘analogy’, which means a new case may be governed by an older case when the facts of the new case are similar to those of the older one. Therefore, the best way to evaluate which are the legally relevant facts for a particular rule is to consider new sets of facts.
Finally, you should accept that some opinions are vague. Sometimes a court won’t explain its reasoning very well, and that forces us to try to figure out what the opinion means. In such cases when you look for the ‘ratio decidendi’ of the case but b you can’t find one do not blame yourself, some opinions are written in a narrow way so that there is no clear decidendi, and others are just poorly reasoned or written. Rather than trying to fill in the ambiguity with false certainty, try embracing the ambiguity instead.
Remember:
One of the skills of great lawyers is that they know what they don’t know: they know when the law is unclear. Indeed, this skill of identifying when a problem is easy and when it is hard (in the sense of being unsettled or unresolved by the courts) is one of the keys to doing very well in law school and in practice.
