November 16, 2012

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Friday 11/16, the class took Exam #2. I will return that exam on Monday, and we will go over it then. Also on Monday I plan to distribute the second case brief assignment, which I plan to make due Friday 11/30. The reading assignment for Monday 11/19 is to read and prepare to discuss from p. 115 to the end of Chapter 3, full faith and credit.

POS 359 FEDERALISM
In class today Friday 11/16, we began by going through Roberts' footnotes, seeing how he used those footnotes to attack specific portions of Ginsburg's opinion, and we speculated about how Ginsburg might respond to Roberts. We then listened to the first ten minutes of a BBC interview with Poland's Foreign Minister Sikorski, listening particularly to how the issues faced by the EU and the Eurozone today have similarities to the issues faced by the United States under the Articles of Confederation. Since we did not finish listening to that interview (I kept interrupting, I'm afraid) part of the assignment for Monday 11/19 is to listen to the remainder of that interview. It is available at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0106bgw
or else just google: bbc radio hardtalk sikorski
The rest of the assignment is to finish up paper #2 due at the beginning of the class on Monday 11/19.


POS 359 THE CURRENT SUPREME COURT TERM
In class today, Friday 11/16, we continued our exploration of the Florida Supreme Court Opinion in Jardines. We finished the majority decision, and then talked about how the three Justice concurrence differed from the majority decision. We will finish up the concurrence on Monday, as well as the dissent. The additional assignment for Monday 11/19 is to read the oral argument transcript from the U.S. Supreme Court, which can be accessed from the Supreme Court site,and selecting Florida v. Jardines, 10/31/12.