April 30, 2015

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Thursday 4/30, I first reminded the class that Exam #2 will be Thursday 5/7 beginning at 8:45. If you are missing any handouts, email me with your requests by 9:00 pm on Wednesday 5/6. The discussion of subject-matter jurisdiction continued from Tuesday with the U.S. Supreme Court case of Bowles v. Russell. I then compared that approach with the approach taken by the Maine Supreme Court in the Landmark Realty case that we talked about on Tuesday. We also went over the consequences of having something labeled as subject matter jurisdiction, in terms of waiver, excuse, and sua sponte raising of the issue. We then switched to personal jurisdiction. I went over four usual ways in which the forum state acquires jurisdiction over a defendant: service of process within the state, domicile, consent, and the doing of certain acts with the state. We looked at the long-arm statute in the text, and then talked about how the U.S. Constitution limits the ability of states to haul out-of-staters into the forum's courts. We contrasted the idea of personal jurisdiction versus subject-matter jurisdiction in terms of waiver, etc. and in terms of constitutional uniformity. We also differentiated the concept of personal jurisdiction from the concept of choice of law rules. We went over the Swoboda case. Finally, I talked about the U.S. Supreme Court case of Walden v. Fiore, and we went over general jurisdiction versus specific jurisdiction. See you Thursday 5/7.



POS 383 AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
In class today, Thursday 4/30, I first reminded the class that Exam #2 will be Tuesday 5/5 beginning at 10:30. If you are missing any handouts, email me with your requests by 9:00 pm on Monday 5/4. I collected the Zivotofsky papers, and plan to return them on Tuesday. We talked about Kennedy's vote in the case, and then about how you thought that the case should come out. After that, I talked about part 2 of the oral argument in the same sex marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges. Part 2 asked whether the 14th Amendment required a state to recognize a same sex marriage performed in another state. We first talked about DOMA and what it has to say about state to state recognition. We talked about the Full Faith and Credit clause, and how it's been interpreted by the Supreme Court. And we talked about how the issue, as framed by the Court, seemed to skirt both of these sources of law. We looked at the differences between recognition versus licensing, in terms of which was a greater intrusion onto state sovereignty. And we looked at some unusual sources of hostile questioning, both from the liberal and from the conservatives.
See you Tuesday 5/5.