September 13, 2016

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Tuesday 9/13, I distributed two handouts: an article by Brittany Maynard about her right to assistance in suicide, and an excerpt from the same-sex marriage case of Obergefell v. Hodges about the identification of fundamental rights. We began class by reviewing the holding of the Miller case at least as far as we understood it. We reviewed the concurrence by Breyer and the dissents by Roberts, Thomas, and Alito. We went over the difference between a concurrence in the judgment, versus a concurrence in the opinion. We talked about three institutional conflicts that the Court deals with: the rights of individual versus the power of government; the power of federal versus state government; and the separation of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial authority. I then talked about the 2016 case of Montgomery v. Louisiana, which dealt with the question of the retroactive application of the rule in Miller to prisoners who were already serving automatic LWOP sentences. We saw how the Montgomery majority interpreted the holding in Miller to be that the imposition of LWOP was categorically barred, regardless of procedure, as long as the juvenile was not found to be permanently incorrigible. We then turned our attention to substantive due process. We looked at the language and history of the due process clause. We went through the Glucksberg case brief as far as the prior proceedings, which is where we'll pick up on Thursday. We also talked about how the designation of a right as "fundamental", or not, would result in either high hurdle or low hurdle oversight by the Court of the legislation that's being challenged. The assignment for Thursday 9/15 is to review Glucksberg and your case brief of it, and to read today's 2 handouts.