January 22, 2016

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Friday 1/22, I distributed one handout, the template for the case briefs that the class will be doing. We launched into the Reis case, going over the first 4 questions from the question sheet that I passed out on Wednesday. We went over in detail all four ways in which Reis failed to bring up the HCCA issue, even though they did in fact eventually bring it up to the trial court. We will pick up on Monday with question #5 (authority) from that sheet. The assignment for Monday 1/25 is to review the Reis opinion, and, using the Brief Template distributed today, try your hand at producing a case brief for Reis (not handed in or graded).


POS 484 CRIMINAL DUE PROCESS
In class today, Friday 1/22, I first talked about the Maine statute about driving too slowly, and how you shouldn't trust what you believe to be the law unless you confirm it by looking it up. I talked about the two companion cases in which the U.S. Supreme Court granted cert. in addition to Birchfield, Beylund and Bernard, and the variation in facts that are presented by those cases. We then started a detailed examination of Birchfield, paragraph by paragraph. As we went along, we tried to put the paragraphs into an outline. We got through ¶6 of the N.D. opinion, which is where we'll pick up on Monday. The assignment for Monday 1/25 is to review Birchfield, trying to put the opinion into an outline by labeling each paragraph and grouping those paragraphs into subdivisions like II(A) and II(B), with labels and content for each subdivision (not handed in or graded).