February 6, 2018

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Tuesday 2/6, I distributed one handout, my version of the Miller case brief. We went through the majority opinion in Miller, as well as Breyer's concurrence. We discussed the difference between concurring in the judgment versus concurring in the opinion. We went through the votes in the Miller case, and saw how Kennedy's vote was crucial. I also went over four previous Supreme Court cases that discussed sentencing of juveniles: Thompson v. Oklahoma; Stanford v. Kentucky; Roper v. Simmons; and Graham v. Florida. We will pick up on Thursday with the three dissenting opinions in Miller. I will also discuss a recent Supreme Court case that deals with those juveniles (now old men) who were automatically sentenced to life without parole years prior to Miller.
The assignment for Thursday 2/8 is to read in the text through p. 34 (including the Glucksberg case). You don't have to write out a case brief of Glucksberg, but read it with an eye toward briefing.


POS 484 CRIMINAL DUE PROCESS
In class today, Tuesday 2/6, I distributed two handouts: my version of an outline of Jones, and the text of the Court of Appeals decision in U.S. v. Carpenter. We started class by finishing our discussion of Katz. We looked at how the Court switched the definition of "search" away from the intrusion into a protected space, and it moved to a violation of the reasonable expectation of privacy. We talked about the difference between a subjective versus an objective expectation of privacy, as laid out in Harlan's concurrence. We also talked about the third-party doctrine (sharing information with a third party, like a phone company or a bank, shows that it's not "private"), and the "open fields" doctrine (from Oliver v. U.S.: there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in open fields). We then went to the Jones case. We counted votes and saw how Sotomayor decided whether Scalia's or Alito's view would become the majority opinion. We saw how Scalia resurrected pre-Katz law of physical intrusion as one way of conducting a "search", and how Alito stuck to the Katz formulation of how to define a "search". We will begin Thursday by exploring the exact point at which there is a search (the attachment of the GPS?; the first use?; prolonged use?).
The assignment for Thursday 2/8 is to review Jones, look at my version of the Jones outline, read the Carpenter case (at least through p. 6), and then write out (not handed in or graded) an outline of those first 6 pages of Carpenter.