February 21, 2019

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Thursday 2/21, we first went through Souter's concurrence in Glucksberg. We talked about his views on the characterization of the asserted right, and the reason that he nonetheless voted against the doctors. Along the way, I went over three recurring institutional conflicts in the law: the rights of the individual versus the power of government; the tension in a federal system between the power of the federal government versus the power of the state governments; and the separation of powers between the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches. We then turned to the Carter case that is the subject of next week's graded case brief assignment. We went over correct citation form for the case, and discussed the Massachusetts common law (non-statutory) crime of which she was convicted. We looked at the sufficiency of the evidence issue, and saw how it was really divided into two separate issues, ¶10-11 and then ¶12-16. We then took one of the issues that is not included in the assignment (for the Issue, Facts, and Holding segments), the Due Process issue of vagueness. We worked through the formulation of that issue. We refined our initial stab at the legal question ("...does the common law provide sufficient notice of the elements of involuntary manslaughter...") to the more specific ("...does the common law provide sufficient notice of whether instructing a victim to kill himself "causes" the victim's death..."). We will work together through the other 2 non-assigned issues in Carter (free speech and expert witness) next Tuesday.
The assignment for Tuesday 2/26 is to continue your work on the Carter case brief, due at the beginning of class 2/28.



POS 359 THE CURRENT SUPREME COURT TERM
In class today, Thursday 2/21, I distributed one handout, yesterday's Supreme Court opinion in Timbs v. Indiana. I started class talking about a Court decision this week, Moore v. Texas, in which the Court ruled in another competency to execute case, this one about intellectual disability (as opposed to Madison and dementia). I went over how the Court majority found that the instructions that it had previously given to the Texas court had been ignored, and how that's one way to get to take a case for the second time. We also went through the specific ways in which the intellectual disability had been evaluated by Texas (twice) and what the Court found was wrong with that evaluation. I briefly talked about the dissent in the case as well. We then returned to Panetti. I went over the problem that the Court identified with the Court of Appeals decision in the case: looking only at the prisoner's awareness of the state's reason for the execution, as opposed to the prisoner himself having a rational understanding of the reason for the execution. I want to begin next week with a look at mandatory authority used by Panetti, and the role of trial courts in findings of fact.
The assignment for Tuesday 2/26 is review both the majority and dissenting opinions in Panetti; review the Madison briefs; and listen to and read the oral argument in Madison.