November 29, 2018

POS 384 CIVIL LIBERTIES
In class today, Thursday 11/29, I distributed one handout, Breyer's opinion in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. We began class by reviewing Roe v.Wade. We looked at its use of strict scrutiny, both in terms of trimesters and in terms of viability of the fetus. We also reviewed the Roe dissenting opinions. We looked at the Gallup poll on abortion and talked about how well its categories applied to the different opinions in Roe. We then went to Casey. We counted votes. We then used the outline of the Joint Opinion to follow its opinion, which both upheld the "essential holding" of Roe, but also made significant changes both in terms of the flow chart of "liberty" analysis, and the time frames of permissible state regulation of abortion. We started to discuss Blackmun's opinion, which is what we'll pick up with on Tuesday.
The assignment for Tuesday 12/4 is to review the remaining opinions in Casey, and to read and prepare to discuss today's handout.


POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Thursday 11/29, we began by going over Butler and the subject of dictum. We saw how the Ohio Supreme Court basically wrote off explicit language in the U.S. Supreme Court Miranda case that said the opposite of what the Ohio court was saying, and why the Ohio court was able to get away with that. I then talked about the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case of Harris v. New York, which came to the same conclusion about the use of un-Mirandized statements used for purposes of impeachment as had the Butler court. We then moved to the subject of prospective v. retroactive application of a court decision. I went over Johnson v. New Jersey, which settled the question of whether the Miranda opinion itself applies to cases that were commenced before the date of the Miranda opinion. I also reminded the class of Montgomery v. Louisiana, which had the broadest possible retroactive application. We went over Dempsey v. Allstate from the text, in which the Montana Supreme Court decided on a retroactivity rule that was like neither the old nor the new federal retroactivity rule.
The assignment for Tuesday 12/4 is to read in the text pp. 113-116 (Hubbard v. Greeson) and also 144-146 (Land v. Yamaha).