November 17, 2015

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Tuesday 11/17, we first finished up our discussion of NFIB by looking at Ginsburg's dissenting opinion. I talked about and cited examples of the police power, supremacy, ex post facto laws, and statutory construction. We discussed State v. Butler, and then looked at how the U.S. Supreme Court dealt with that impeachment issue in Harris v. N.Y. We began our discussion of retroactive v. prospective application of court decisions by looking at the four U.S. Supreme Court cases about those rules, Linkletter and Griffith (on the criminal side) and Chevron and Harper (on the civil side). We will continue with the Montana Dempsey case on Thursday. The additional reading for Thursday 11/19 is to read in the text through p. 115 (Strunk and Greeson).


POS 384 CIVIL LIBERTIES
In class today, Tuesday 11/17, I first passed back the Bible Believers papers, and made some comments. We then went to White's concurrence in R.A.V., in which he found the ordinance overbroad (and therefore unconstitutional) because it removed from Free Speech protection more than just fighting words. We puzzled out Scalia's R.A.V. handout, under which some content-based subsets are allowable (even though the one on R.A.V. itself was not allowable). I discussed the 2003 case of Virginia v. Black, in which the Supreme Court dealt with a state law that outlawed cross-burning with the intent to intimidate. We looked at the the majority and dissenting views within the Virginia Supreme Court, and then looked at the O'Connor and the Souter opinions in the case, and how they treated that Scalia handout. We then turned our attention to Snyder v. Phelps. We started by looking at the Maine statute that outlawed fighting words at funeral services. We talked about the idea of state action in suits of one individual versus another. We also went over the protection from suit by plaintiffs who were public officials and public figures. We will pick up on Thursday with the concept of limited purpose public figures, and the case of one University of Maine professor suing the Bangor Daily News for a letter written by another University of Maine professor. We will go over Snyder v. Phelps (previously assigned) next class. The additional assignment for Thursday 11/19 is to read in the text pp. 409-420.