Fellow Students Lesson Appellate Brief

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Fellow Students Lesson Appellate Brief

This problem centers around the law of agency which we do not study as a class until Lesson 14, the week your final paper will be due. For this project, you will draft an appellate brief to the State of Florida appellate court. In this brief, you will present the issue(s) to be resolved in this fact pattern. You will conduct legal research utilizing the tools provided in the Lesson 05 video (How To Do Free Internet Legal Research). You will read and apply the law that you find into a discussion/argument answering the issues raised in the fact pattern.

While you are welcome to proceed at your own pace, certain benchmarks have been provided throughout the course of the semester to keep you on track to providing a fully written and edit final paper in a timely fashion. As such, your first step after re-reading the fact pattern is to review your fellow students’ Lesson 05 discussion posts to formulate the issue(s) to discuss in your paper.

  • STEP 1: Run a Google search to find the Wikipedia (or any other secondary source) definition of an employee and independent contractor – Lesson 06
  • STEP 2: Run a Google search to find the Wikipedia (or any other secondary source) definition of the term vicarious liability. Next, determine what it means for an agent “to act within the scope of their employment” – Lesson 08
  • STEP 3: Conduct your legal research. Find several supporting cases, statutes or administrative regulations that may help support your client’s position.
    • you will take the side of the appellee (Matthews).
  • STEP 4: Draft outline to your arguments, cover page, issue(s) to be presented on appeal and statement of facts. View the following attachment for an example of sample brief sample brief – Alternative Formats . Remember, however, that your Court is sitting in Florida. – Lesson 11
  • STEP 5: Draft the argument section of your paper. Here you are utilizing the research you have found to fully answer the issues on appeal – Lesson 12

Appellate Brief Rubric (100 pts):

  • 15 pts – Grammar/ Punctuation and Spelling
  • 15 pts – APA Formatting and References
  • 70 pts – Content Knowledge

There is a maximum limit of 20 pages. There is no required minimum; however, as the “Argument Section” provides the content knowledge in this exercise, it is important to provide full arguments and answer(s) to the question(s) presented. Better papers have been those in the range of 7-10 pages, although sufficient arguments have between presented in less than 7 or more than 10 pages.