Facts are critical to lawyers and law students. Lawyers get paid to separate relevant facts from irrelevant facts and then apply the facts to the the law. As law students, it is an essential skill for doing well on law school exams. Most law students spend insufficient time on learning this skill. One place to start is to understand that all the facts that a client (or a law professor) gives you do not have equal performance. Thus, a student must learn to categorize facts appropriately.
There are lots of different terms used to categorize facts (key, legally significant, essential). It is not the name that is important but the skill of identifying facts that fit within the category AND then using those facts appropriately in analysis.
Key Facts Facts which create the dispute; or help resolve the dispute. Facts can take two basic form:
Primary Facts tend to prove or disprove an element of a rule without any additional facts or inferences.
Secondary Facts always need other facts or inferences to prove or disprove an element of a rule.
Background facts Made to fill out the story but changing the background facts does not have any effect on the legal analysis
Influential Facts Facts which may effect the outcome of the dispute but on a strictly legal basis probably will not.
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