Case Brief

Complete case briefs for two assigned cases:

* Office of Personnel Management, Petitioner v. Charles Richmond Case from text at pp. 13-19;

* Appeal of University of California, San Francisco from text at pp. 688-693

Instructions:

Submit a written “Case Brief” for both of the above cases. Providing a “Case Brief” will improve your critical legal thinking and writing skills and help you gain a better understanding of the Court’s decision and the underlying law affecting an area of government procurement.

The format for your written “Case Brief” consists for five parts:

1. Case name and citation

2. Key Facts

3. Legal Issue(s) Presented before Court

4. Holding of the Court

5. Court’s Rationale or Reasoning for its Decision

Take a look at the following link for additional guidance on how to write a written case brief: http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/research/brief.html (Links to an external site.). You are not required to complete steps 6 or 7 discussed at the above web site.

Your challenge will be to condense the material in your text yet at the same time ensure that you sufficiently cover the 5 parts noted above.

You are required to write your answers with Microsoft Word (Times New Roman, 12 pt) and include your names on all pages for grading purposes.

How To Brief a Case

Confusion often arises over the term “legal brief.” There are at least two different senses in which the term is used.

Appellate brief

An appellate brief is a written legal argument presented to an appellate court. Its purpose is to persuade the higher court to uphold or reverse the trial court’s decision. Briefs of this kind are therefore geared to presenting the issues involved in the case from the perspective of one side only.

Appellate briefs from both sides can be very valuable to anyone assessing the legal issues raised in a case. Unfortunately, they are rarely published. The U.S. Supreme Court is the only court for which briefs are regularly available in...