January 19, 2012

POS 282--Introduction to American Law
In class today, Thursday 1/19, we finished going over the Court of Appeals violent video games opinion, and we finished going over my sample brief of the opinion. Along the way, I also covered a few other legal concepts, such as de novo review, Court of Appeal panel and en banc decisions, dictum, and mandatory versus persuasive authority. We studied the outline structure of the Court of Appeals decision, and used that structure to help us in pinpointing the issues that the court addressed. The assignment for Tuesday 1/24 is to re-read the U.S. Supreme Court decision in this case, as previously assigned. Follow the outline that the Court uses. Does the majority opinion differ from the Court of Appeals decision in any way? In what ways do the concurring and dissenting opinions differ from the majority opinion? How would these differences be reflected in a case brief?

POS 359--The Current Supreme Court Term
In class today, Thursday 1/19. I distributed one handout, a news article regarding the Governor's call for public prayer, and we talked about the tension between the free exercise right of prayer versus the establishment clause questions regarding public prayer by government officials. I explained the concepts of reasoning a fortiori, and the concept of strict scrutiny versus rational basis review. We continued our outlining of Hosanna-Tabor, adding structure to Part II (C) that was not supplied by the Court. We also went into the developments in the aftermath of the Smith case. We will continue with our exploration of Hosanna-Tabor next Tuesday. In preparing your outline, create subsections not supplied by the Court, as necessary. In addition to generally reviewing the decision, I asked the class to review the facts regarding exactly what the Church did once Perich told them on January 27 that she would be able to return to work the following month. We decided that the first paper for the class would be on Hosanna-Tabor, and so your detailed study of the case will not have been in vain.