April 16, 2007

POS 282--Intro. to American Law
In class today, Monday 4/16, I handed back the exams from last week. We went over the concepts of Chapter 8 on family law, and the 2 cases and statutes that I distributed last week. Here's the writing assignment for next Monday:

The assignment for Monday, April 23, 2007 is

•1) Read Chapter 9 of the text on Civil Procedure, etc. Pages 294-295 discuss the process of jury selection and voir dire.

•2) Read the following Maine Supreme Court cases
State v. Stoddard, 1997 ME 114
State v. Lowry, 2003 ME 38
Grover v. Boise Cascade, 2004 ME 119
All of these cases are available from the Maine courts website
http://www.courts.state.me.us/opinions/supreme/index.html

•3) For each case, write out the holding of the Court regarding eachvoir dire issue. (Not the other issues in the case.)
Here are two sample holdings from a family law case for today, Jacobs v. Jacobs:

Under 19-A MRSA §4002(4), two adults are not “household members” when they are related by consanguinity (siblings) but there is no evidence that they ever lived together, as adults or otherwise.

Under 19-A MRSA §4002(4), two adults are not “presently or formerly living together” when they are related by consanguinity (siblings) but there is no evidence that they ever lived together, as adults or otherwise.

Notice the 3-part format for a holding:
Under what law... Under 19-A MRSA §4002(4)...

The operative legal question... two adults are not “household members”

Under what facts... when they are related by consanguinity (siblings) but there is no evidence that they ever lived together, as adults or otherwise.

•4) Finally, write what your evaluation is of the Court’s decisions (regarding the voir dire issue). If you were designing a court system, would your system agree with the results that the Court reaches? To what extent do the holdings of the Court make for a good system, and to what extent would the arguments of the losing side have produced a better system? Finally, do you think that the whole system of peremptory challenges itself produces a fair and unbiased jury, or do you think that it just favors that side that has the resources to research the jury pool enough to find out by its own means the likely sympathies of each potential juror?