February 3, 2011

POS 359--The Current Supreme Court Term -- 2011
In class today I collected the Snyder v. Phelps papers, and we discussed how the case might and should turn out. It is my intent to hand back those papers next Tuesday. The class then voted on which case we should grapple with next. The winner of our vote was Kentucky v. King, argued on January 12, which had the police in hot pursuit of a drug dealer, but then not sure about which door he had ducked into. Finally, I went over three recent Supreme Court decisions: one dealing with liberty interests in a state parole system; one dealing with retaliation against a fiance of an employee who had claimed Title VII sex discrimination; and the last dealing with the power of credit card issuers to raise interest rates without giving specific notice of that rate increase. The assignment for Tuesday 2/8 is to read the Petitioners Brief in the case of Kentucky v. King. The brief can be found through the Supreme Court website/ merits briefs/ online merits briefs (to the abanet site) and scrolling down to Kentucky v. King.

POS 282--Introduction to American Law
In class today, Thursday 2/3, I first apologized for not having completed the grading of the Lyman case briefs. I'll finish them this weekend, and return them on Tuesday. I distributed one handout, my own version of the Lyman brief. We finished our review of the Maine statute (distributed last Thursday) regarding use of force in defense of premises. We then began our discussion of the Glucksberg case, exploring both the methodology of determining whether a give right is "fundamental", and the consequences if the the right does belong in that category. The assignment for Tuesday 2/8 is to re-read Glucksberg in light of today's (hopefully) clarifying explanation of what the Court was doing.