October 30, 2008

POS 282--Introduction to American Law
In class today, Thursday 10/30, I distributed and we went over the next case brief assignment, which is copied below. We went through some of the concepts in the text, including the ex post facto prohibition. I went over one recent Maine case regarding our sex offender registry, Doe v. District Attorney, 2007 ME 139. We covered the Butler and Apsey cases in the text. The assignment for Tuesday November 4 is to read and prepare to discuss through the end of Chapter 3, and to begin work on the case brief below.


Assignment due Thursday, November 6, 2008

The assignment is to do a Case Brief of the case of Geujo Lok Beteiligungs GMBH v. Zorn, 2008 ME 50 . The case can be found on the website of the Maine Supreme Court.

Go to the website: http://www.courts.state.me.us/

On the left, under Court Information, select “Opinions and Orders”

Then select “Supreme Court”

Scroll down that page to the list of 2008 Opinions, and select 2008 ME 50.

The Brief should be in exactly the format used in the Sample Brief Template distributed in class.

For the beginning parts of the Brief, (including the “Appellant’s Contentions” portion of the Brief,) include all of the case, (including all of the contentions raised by Appellant). For the “Facts”, “Issues”, and “Holdings”, however, only brief the facts, issues and holding regarding “Due Process” (¶ 16-19) and “Personal Jurisdiction” (¶ 20 - 23).

Please make two copies of your brief, one to hand in at the beginning of class, and the other for you to have during class for our discussion.

You may e-mail me if you have questions about the brief. The more time that I have to answer our questions, the more likely it is that I can be helpful.

If you cannot be in class on Thursday 11/ 6, you should still e-mail me your brief by the beginning of class time. If you do that, you will not have any grade deducted from your grade for the brief. If you do not, you should still contact me as soon as possible to see what options are available to you. (Generally, I do not want to accept assignments after we have discussed them in class). See the Syllabus for the class rules regarding late papers.

IMPORTANT : If you e-mail your paper to me, I will reply to confirm that I have received your assignment. If I do not reply, then I have not received the assignment.


CMJ 375-- Mass Media Law
In class today, Thursday 10/30, we discussed the remainder of the four privacy torts, and the Diaz and Shulman case from the casebook. I also went over one Maine case regarding false light, Gavrilovic v. Worldwide Language Resources. The assignment for Tuesday 11/4 is to read and prepare to discuss the remainder of Chapter 5, and the Falwell (p. 118) and Armstrong (p.120) cases in the casebook.