April 5, 2018

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Thursday 4/5, I distributed one handout, the 2 federal statutes involved in the Corbin case. We then went over how to approach the Corbin brief. We discussed citation form in U.S. District Court; the fact that the "Parties" segment did not have the appellant/appellee part, because this opinion is not an appeal; there are no "Prior Proceedings"; and that instead of "Appellant's" contentions, here we have Corbin's (the Movant) contentions. We saw how those contentions could feed right into the legal questions asked. We identified 4 contentions, leading to 4 issues. We went over those issues in terms of the 4 segments involved in each issue: Under what law; the legal question; the facts (reasons that the winning side wins) and the loser's facts (the reasons that the losing side maintained that it should have won). We also went over the requirements of the "Copy and paste" format. That case brief is due at the beginning of class on Thursday 4/12. I also reviewed that students cannot collaborate with others. Even if a classmate missed today's class, you may not share today's discussion with him or her. I am the only person with whom the case brief may be discussed.
After finishing our discussion of Corbin, I went over one Maine Supreme Court case regarding attorney ethics, Board of Overseers v. Warren, 2011 ME 124. In discussing that case we reviewed the difference between a subjective test v. an objective test. We then began our discussion of NFIB v. Sebelius. We talked about the Supremacy Clause. I went over the limited powers of the federal Congress v. the police power of state legislatures. I also explained why the textbook discussion of the interstate commerce power from that opinion was really dictum, as all the Court needed to decided was whether the individual mandate was justified under the power to tax. We will start with the substance of NFIB v. Sebelius on Tuesday.
The assignment for Tuesday 4/10 is to review NFIB v. Sebelius, to read in addition through p. 106 of the text (including State v. Butler), and to continue working on your Corbin case brief, due at the beginning of the class on Thursday 4/12.


POS 484 CRIMINAL DUE PROCESS
In class today, Thursday 4/5, I distributed one handout, the Maine Supreme Court opinion in State v. Ormsby,
2013 ME 88. We first reviewed the Escobedo case in terms of when the right to counsel attached, and then contrasted that with the point at which Miranda rights attached. We went over the 4 rights included in Miranda, and the rationale of why a preventative rule was needed. We looked at the ways the Court tried in advance to protect its rule from future encroachments, by making the application of the Miranda rules uniform and consistent, without regard to the particular attributes of the suspect, or the requirement of magic words to invoke the rights guaranteed. We then began our discussion of Seibert, beginning with the holding in Elstad (p. 528). We will pick up next week with how the Seibert plurality distinguished Elstad, and also how Kennedy's concurrence defines the holding of the case.
The assignment for Tuesday 4/10 is to review Seibert, and to read the Ormsby case that was distributed today.