September 17, 2019

POS 282 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LAW
In class today, Tuesday 9/17, we began by going over the Miller majority opinion again, stressing exactly what it was that the Court held. We went over the concurrence by Breyer, and the dissents by Roberts and Thomas. I talked about the difference between an concurrence in the opinion versus a concurrence in the judgment. I then discussed the 2016 case of Montgomery v. Louisiana, in which the Court dealt with the issue of whether the Miller holding was to be applied retroactively. I gave the line-up of Justices in both Miller and Montgomery, and speculated about the one Justice who "switched sides" between the two opinions. Then we went through the 2 handouts of the Summary of Argument in the current SCOTUS case of Mathena v. Malvo.
The assignment for Thursday 9/19 is to review the Maine sentencing statute handout from last week, and to read and prepare to discuss through p. 34 of the text, including Washington v. Glucksberg.




POS 484 CRIMINAL DUE PROCESS
In class today, Tuesday 9/17, I distributed one handout, my version of the outline of the Jardines dissenting opinion. We began, though, by both reviewing the majority opinion in Jardines, and then discussing Kagan's concurrence. We then went through Alito's dissenting opinion. As we went along, we put the dissent in the format of the outline. Along the way, I clarified the meaning of common law regarding the law of trespass that Alito discussed. I then went over the facts of the 1988 Maine Law Court opinion in State v. Cloutier, 544 A.2d 1277. We discussed how the case would come out under the Jardines intrusion test (rather than the privacy test that the Law Court did apply). Finally, we went back to the handout of the Maine statute regarding use of drones in law enforcement, and puzzled out the language of exceptions to the warrant requirement that's in the statute. We also went over Maine statutory citation form.
The assignment for Thursday 9/19 is to read through p. 72 of the text, including Kyllo v. U.S.