March 24, 2017

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Friday 3/24, I first went over some aspects of the Williams case brief, due on Friday 3/31. We talked about the mechanism of post-conviction review, Brady violations, the disposition of the case, and using the structure of the opinion (the outline) in order to figure out the issues addressed by Kennedy. We then returned to the Caperton case, and noted that the structure there was roughly the same as that used in Williams: first the Court decides what standard is required by due process, and the the Court applies that standard to the particular facts of the case. On Monday we will continue our Caperton discussion by starting with the issue of applying the facts of Caperton to the standard of whether there is a significant, disproportionate influence in helping a judge get elected in a pending case.
The assignment for Monday 3/27 is to continue working on your Williams case brief, due at the beginning of class on 3/31, review the rest of Caperton, and read in the text and prepare to discuss pp. 58-64 (Mobbley).


POS 384 CIVIL LIBERTIES
In class today, Friday 3/24, I distributed 1 handout, an excerpt from the Bangor sign ordinance. I collected the Reed outlines, and we went over them. We got as far as Thomas' discussion of how the Court of Appeals had erred in identifying the ordinance as one based on the identity of the speaker, which Thomas said was incorrect as a factual question. That's the point at which we'll pick up our discussion on Monday. As we went through the Reed outline, we also compared the Gilbert ordinance with Bangor's and identified a number of ways in which Bangor's could be considered fscially content-based.
The assignment for Monday 3/27 is to review U.S. v. Williams, and to read in the text pp. 390-401, including Griswold v. Connecticut.