April 23, 2014

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Wednesday 4/23, I first finished the discussion of Collins v. Trius. We then went over Hubbard v. Greeson. We covered all elements of the case brief for that case, and along the way we talked about the relationship of common law to statutes, the challenges faced by Greeson's lawyer in deciding which states' law would be better for Greeson's case, and then where to bring suit in order to get the better law to apply. We also talked about wrongful death statutes, treatment of precedent, and the two-step process created by the Court. The assignment for Friday 4/25 is to read in the text pp. 145-147. The assigned case, Land v. Yamaha, takes the conflict of law rule created in Hubbard, and applies it in the setting of a federal court. We'll talk about federal court jurisdiction, and what law a federal court applies.


POS 384 CIVIL LIBERTIES
In class today, Wednesday 4/23, we had the treat of having Shenna Bellows, former Executive Director of the ACLU of Maine, address the class. She discussed many topics, including some history of the ACLU, the Patriot Act, NSA metadata collection, anonymous speech, abortion clinic access, campaign finance, and Fourth Amendment cell phone data searches. (She covered more in one class than I do in one semester.) Now that we've glimpsed the forest, we'll return to the trees: the assignment for Friday 4/25 is continue your work on the Drake assignment (due May 2nd) and to review the previously assigned BIO and Reply Brief.


POS 359 THE CURRENT SUPREME COURT TERM
In class today, Wednesday 4/23, I first clarified a question about Friday's exam: the exam will cover not only the current cases that I listed on Wednesday, but also the precedent relied on by the Court or the parties regarding the proper disposition of the current case. So, for example, the case of Schuette v. BAMN, discussed again today, incorporates the previous Hunter, Seattle, and Romer cases that we discussed in conjunction with Schuette. We spent the class going over the four opinions in yesterday's decision in Schuette, in which no majority emerged. We'll have the exam on Friday, go over the exam and then additional cases on Monday and the Friday of next week (no classes on Wednesday because of Maine Day).