January 26, 2012

POS 282--Introduction to American Law
In class today, Thursday 1/26, I distributed two handouts; an article by Tony Judt about life with ALS, and my version of the case brief for Washington v. Glucksberg. We went through that case brief up to the first issue that the Court dealt with. We will finish up the Glucksberg case brief next Tuesday. I also discussed three institutional conflicts that recur in our legal system: the individual v. the government, the separation of powers between the judicial, executive and legislative, and federal v. state power. The assignment for Tuesday 1/31, in addition to reviewing Glucksberg, is to read in the text pp. 32-36, and to do a practice brief (write it out, but you won't hand it in) of the Smith case on p. 34.

PL 359--The Current Supreme Court Term
In class today, Thursday 1/26, we first went over some observations that I had on Hosanna-Tabor. Though the Church won a unanimous verdict, it did not succeed on one claim: that the ministerial exception should be treated as a jurisdictional bar, rather than an affirmative defense. They did get broader protection than what they were advocated for, though, in other areas such as whether a minister has to engage in an important religious function. We discussed the Lemon v. Kurtzman 1971 Establishment Clause case, with its "entanglement" prong, and the lack of mention of Lemon in either the briefing or the Opinion. We then switched to the recent Perry v. Perez Texas redistricting case, with its own silence on the elephant in the room question, the constitutionality of the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act. The assignment for Tuesday 1/31 is to continue working on the Hosanna-Tabor papers previously assigned.