January 25, 2017

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Wednesday 1/25, we continued our trip through the Nunez opinion. We went through the paragraphs of the opinion that laid out the rules about the scope of appellate review (over both factual and legal questions); the definition of probable cause and what it takes to establish it; the replacement of the Aguilar/Spinelli test with the Gates test; the legal issues that the Court decides; the lack of mandatory authority on the crucial question of connection between the drug-dealing and the residence; the use of persuasive authority to establish a rule about that connection; and then the conclusion (holding) about the connection (that's where we'll continue on Friday, as well as discussing disposition). We will also on Friday go over the case brief template and my Nunez brief.
The assignment for Friday 1/27 is to review the template and my Nunez brief, and then to read in the text pp 1-15.


POS 384 CIVIL LIBERTIES
In class today, Wednesday 1/25, I distributed one handout, an article about the recent court decision in India that banned campaign speech that uses religion or caste as part of campaigning. We discussed the competing social values of avoiding conflict and incitement versus allowing freedom of speech. We then resumed our discussion of Lee v. Tam. I went over three concepts that ran through the argument: the protections from government regarding commercial speech versus non-commercial speech; the different teats (levels of scrutiny) given to different kinds of speech; and types of unprotected speech (libel, fighting words, obscenity). On Friday I want to finish up our Lee v. Tam discussion.
The assignment for Friday 1/27 is to read in the text pp. 276-284 (Bates and Central Hudson) about the level of protection against government interference that is given to commercial speech).