April 9, 2015

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Thursday 4/9, we first discussed ex post fact laws and sex offender registry laws. We moved on to the Butler case, and the status of dictum. I talked about the outcome of the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case, Harris v. U.S., and then we looked at the lineup of Justices that were on both the Miranda and the Harris courts. We moved on to retroactive application of court decisions. I made a little chart of how the U.S. Supreme Court has viewed questions of retroactive v. prospective application for the federal courts, and we examined how the Dempsey Court decided the issue under Montana law. I'm not having the class read the Strunk case (p. 110) and so I gave a short explanation of the issue and the resolution in that case. The assignment for Tuesday 4/14 is to read in the text and prepare to discuss pp. 113-116 (choice of law and Greeson) and pp. 144-146 (Erie doctrine and Land).

POS 383 AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
In class today, Thursday 4/9, I distributed two handouts: the Petitioner's Brief and the Respondent's Brief in the Zivotofsky Supreme Court case. Before discussing the Curtiss-Wright opinion, we first looked at the non-delegation cases that Curtiss-Wright was relying on, Panama Oil and Schechter Poultry (p. 261). We went over the distribution of foreign affairs powers in the text of the constitution itself. We explored the Curtiss-Wright opinion (both parts in the text). The assignment for Tuesday 4/14 is to read the two Zivotofsky briefs.