September 7, 2016

POS 383 CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
In class today, Wednesday 9/7, I distributed two handouts: a list of the Supreme Court Justices with a few useful Supreme Court websites; and my version of an outline of Ginsburg's opinion in Evenwel. We used the structure of the "questions" handout from last week to continue our discussion of voting and the constitution. We went over the Hasen article about the future of voting in the Court after Scalia. We discussed the Crawford voter id. case, and the recent successful challenges to voter id. laws. We talked about the Voting Rights Act, and the Supreme Court's removal of the VRA's key provision. We then turned to apportionment and redistricting. We used Ginsburg's opinion in Evenwel to go over the prior Supreme Court redistricting cases, and what they had to say about the separate question of the base measure for apportionment. I talked about the 1966 case of Burns v. Richardson, and how it dealt with Hawaii's base apportionment measure of actually registered voters versus citizens of voting age. We talked about the different "population" measures that might be used in apportionment: total population, legal residents, citizens, citizens of voting age, or registered voters. We went through Ginsburg's opinion and saw its structure and outline. We then went through the Thomas and Alito concurring opinions. Along the way we talked about Supreme Court citation format; facial versus as-applied legal challenges; the difference between a concurrence in the opinion versus a concurrence in the judgment; originalism; accepting as decided precedent with which a Justice disagrees, versus not accepting precedent; and appeals as of right versus petitions for a writ of certiorari. The assignment for next week, 9/14 is to read the Constitution (especially the part through the Bill of Rights; in the text pp.3-10; 343-355;and 367-387.