January 23, 2017

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Monday 1/23, we continued with our explorations of the issues in Nunez. We went over the questions of whether there was probable cause to believe that the Verona Island home really was Nunez's home, and whether Nunez had drugs in his home. We differentiated winner's facts from loser's facts. We put the holding in the simplest English language that we could, to assure that we got the point of the Court's opinion. We then started looking at the authority relied on by the Court. We discussed the citation form used by all the levels of the federal court system, U.S. Supreme Court (__US__), U.S. Court of Appeals (__F.3d___), and U.S. District Courts (___F.Supp.3d__) as a quick guide to know what level of court is writing the opinion upon which the Court relies for its proposition. We also saw how to identify previous opinions of the Maine Supreme Court.
The assignment for Wednesday 1/25 is to re-read Nunez (yet again), looking at the Court's citation to authority for explanations of both the background rules and of the actual issues answered by the Court.


POS 384 CIVIL LIBERTIES
In class today, Monday 1/23, we first went over the Maine trademark statute, and compared its registration exclusions to that in the federal statute. We talked about Maine and federal statutory citation form. We talked about the loss of registration by the Washington Redskins. This led us to the additional Tam argument that the federal statute was void for vagueness. We also went over the prior proceeding in the Tam case, which included both the panel and the en banc Court of Appeals opinions. We then returned to the transcript. We looked at the questions asked by Ginsburg, Roberts and Breyer, and discussed whether those questions gave some indication of how the Justices were leaning. We discussed the benefits of trademark registration, and how those differed from copyright. We talked about the justification for the exclusion as being the desire to avoid distraction, and how that didn't seem to satisfy Breyer.
The assignment for Wednesday 1/25 is re-read the transcript, with these questions in mind: which arguments are being made by the lawyers; do the questions asked by the Justices give us much of an indication of how those Justices are leaning; and what resolution of the case would make the most sense to you?