## Facts

- A request was made to summarize and brief a reported decision identified only by a regional reporter citation: *Anderson v. Campbell*, 223 N.W. 624 (1929).
- The available material did not include the opinion’s text, headnotes, syllabus, party capacities, lower-court history, or any factual narrative from the court.
- The jurisdiction and deciding court could not be confirmed from the citation alone because the North Western Reporter publishes decisions from multiple states.
- Because the record provided lacked verifiable details, any attempt to state the case’s facts, procedural posture, issues, or holdings would risk conflating it with another case or inventing content.
- The only reliable information available was methodological: a recommended process for locating the decision and extracting parties, posture, facts, issues, holding, reasoning, and disposition from the opinion itself.

## Issues

1. Whether a legally accurate case brief can be prepared when the opinion text and identifying details (court, posture, material facts, and holding) are not provided.
2. What minimum information is required to produce a court-faithful summary of a reported decision identified solely by a regional reporter citation.
3. What steps are necessary to verify the correct case and avoid factual or doctrinal misstatement when summarizing older regional-reporter cases.

## Decision

- No merits brief was produced because the provided material did not supply the opinion or any court-authored statement of facts, issues, rule, or disposition.
- The response was limited to cautionary constraints: without verification, summarization would be unreliable and potentially false.
- A process was identified for producing an accurate brief once the opinion is obtained: confirm the deciding court and full caption; extract procedural posture, material facts, issues, holdings, reasoning, and disposition from the text.

## Legal Principles

- A case summary must be based on verifiable primary material (the opinion text or an authenticated equivalent); otherwise, stating facts or holdings risks misrepresentation.
- A regional reporter citation alone may be insufficient to identify the deciding court, party capacities, and procedural posture without consulting the published opinion.
- At minimum, a reliable brief requires: (i) full caption and court, (ii) material facts as found by the court, (iii) procedural history and posture, (iv) issues framed by the court, (v) holdings and rule statements, (vi) reasoning connecting facts to rules, and (vii) disposition and any remand directions.
- When primary text is unavailable, the only defensible output is a description of verification steps and the structure of a brief, not a reconstructed account of the case’s substance.

## Conclusion

Because the opinion text and identifying details for *Anderson v. Campbell*, 223 N.W. 624 (1929), were not provided, a court-accurate summary of the facts, issues, holding, and reasoning could not be prepared; the case must first be located and verified in the reporter or a legal database before a substantive brief can be written.


Anderson v. Campbell, 223 N.W. 624 (1929)