January 20, 2017

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Friday 1/20, I distributed two handouts: a template for a case brief, and my version of the Nunez case brief. We discussed how the 4th Amendment text answers neither the question of the relationship between unreasonable searches and the warrant requirement, nor the question of remedy if there is a 4th Amendment violation. I gave a short explanation of how the U.S. Supreme Court has filled those gaps. We talked about the organization of the Nunez opinion, in which the Maine Supreme Court outlined their opinion as (I)Background (the story of what happened in the case, and the proceedings prior the case landing in the Supreme Court) and (II)Discussion (the underlying rules, the questions that are addressed, and the answers to those question. We got as far as identifying the first issue that the Court addressed (the "reliability" of the information supplied by the informants (paragraph 22)). We will pick up at that point next Monday. The assignment for Monday 1/23 is to reread Nunez, looking for the other issues and holdings by the Court. The idea is to come away with statements of what the Court holds, in as clear and simple language as possible.


POS 384 CIVIL LIBERTIES
In class today, Friday 1/20, I distributed two handouts: the first had on one side a list of the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, and on the other Maine's trademark statute; the second was the entire (both sides) of the Amy Howe article about the Tam case. We went over the 8 Justices and their political orientation, and I also went over the 5-4 vote in the Walker Confederate license plate case. We started through the Tam transcript. We saw how the government's lawyer tried to take trademark registration out of the 1st Amendment protection for free speech because it is a "government program". We saw how long that position lasted in the face of attacks by Kennedy and Alito. We then talked about the free speech protections against content discrimination and viewpoint discrimination by the government. The assignment for Monday 1/23 is to read the Maine trademark statute, and see if it is subject to the same attack as the federal statute at issue in Tam; and to re-read the Tam transcript (you can also listen to the audio) looking for the rest of the government's position (since "government program" didn't fare well) as well as which Justices seemed hostile to the government's position and to the band's position.