Reading assignment for the first class is pages 925-932.

At our first class, we will page through the Constitution, looking for its general organization, the ways that it is similar to and different from the U.S. Constitution, unusual and interesting provisions, etc. You should try paging through it on your own prior to class.

As early as possible in the semester (ideally, before the first class), you should read the constitutional history contained in the Introduction to Volume I. Knowledge of this extremely interesting history is invaluable (essential) in understanding the Arizona Constitution.

The tentative assignments (all in Volume I) are listed in the syllabus below. The remaining course materials should be available in the near future. The syllabus, of course, is subject to change should the Arizona Supreme Court, the Legislature or anyone else do something of constitutional significance during the semester.

Here is a tentative list of the assignments for the first half of the semester. All assigned pages are in Volume I of the course materials which is now available in the Copy Center. A substantial number of pages within the last few assignments will be skipped.

Class Assignments

Class 1 - Constitutional text
Class 2 - pp. 27 - 38
Class 3 - pp. 39 - 58
Class 4 - pp. 59 - 74
Class 5 - pp. 75 - 99
Class 6 - pp. 100 - 132
Class 7 - pp. 133 - 150
Class 8 - pp. 151 - 186
Class 9 - pp. 187 - 217
Class 10 - pp. 218 - 246
Class 11 - pp. 247 - 290
Class 12 - pp. 290 - 345
Class 13 - pp. 346 - 387

Remember: Although not specifically assigned, read pages 1 - 20 in Volume I at your earliest convenience.

Fong Yue Ting v. U.S., 149 U.S. 698, 13 S.Ct 1016 (1893)

Fiallo v. Bell, 430 U.S. 787, 97 S.Ct. 1473 (1977)

Please read the S.Ct. versions.

And from Business Immigration Law: Forms and Filings (on Reserve), the following:

Chapter 1

2.01, 2.02, 2.03[1][d], 2.03[1][f][i], skim 2.03[2]

3.01, 3.02

The casebook for the class is WARREN & WESTBROOK, THE LAW OF DEBTORS AND CREDITORS (6th Ed., Aspen Law & Business. 2008).

For the first class on Tuesday, Jan. 20, please read Handout # 1 Northern Pacific Railway v. Boyd, 228 U.S. 482 (1912) (edited version available on the Blackboard for this course). Read it carefully and try to figure out what was really going on; I will expect class participation. For class, be prepared to answer:
• In what kind of judicial action was reorganization accomplished without a reorganization statute?
• What do you think was the jurisdictional basis for Boyd to be in federal court?
• Why reorganize instead of liquidate?
• Why do you think the bondholders agreed to dilute their interests in the reorganized debtor by allowing the participation of the old stockholders?
• What does Boyd require creditors to receive if stockholders participate?
• What was a major impediment to out of court workouts at the time of Boyd?
• What did the dissenters in Boyd find alarming about the majority’s decision?

1. There is no commercial casebook for this course, but you will need a copy of the Thomson/West 2008-2009 Educational Edition of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which should be available at the various bookstores. [NOTE: If you already have the Thomson/West 2007-2008 Educational Edition of the FRCP, or some other publisher's version of the FRCP that includes all amendments to the Rules and the Advisory Committee Notes through December 1, 2007, you probably can get by with that version -- but there may be occasions when not having the Thomson/West 2008-2009 Educational Edition will make it more difficult to find specific sub-Rules or Advisory Committee Notes that we are discussing in class.]

2. Class discussions will be based on a series of numbered Handouts. Those Handouts will give you advance notice of the main questions that we will address in class; and they typically will include judicial opinions, legal documents, and other materials for you to read. Your preparation for each class should focus on the Handout questions that have been assigned for that class.

3. The first two Handouts (and this memo) should be available at the Copy Center and on Blackboard. [On Blackboard, the questions and attachments for each Handout are in separate files, with the questions in Word and the attachments in PDF.] If you have trouble accessing the Civ. Pro. II Blackboard site, send me an e-mail [robert.bartels@asu.edu].

4. This course will be concerned primarily with how litigators can (and do) use the officially promulgated Rules of Civil Procedure in the federal and Arizona trial courts. Much of the course will focus on Ruelas v. A.P.S., a civil lawsuit that was litigated in the Maricopa County Superior Court in 1985-86. We will effectively be "re-litigating" the Ruelas case from its beginning at least through the basic pre-trial stages, using materials from the real case, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and relevant case precedents.

FIRST TWO DAYS' ASSIGNMENTS

A. First Day (January 20): Please be prepared on all of Handout 1 and all sub-parts of Question 1 on Handout 2.

B. Second Day (January 22): Please be prepared through Question 4 on Handout 2.

We are not going to use a casebook for this course this semester. Material - - ordinarily U.S. Supreme Court opinions - - will be assigned and students will be expected to find the material, either on their computers or in the library. Students should come to class with either a computer on which the material can be read, a hard copy printout of the material, or both.

U.S. Supreme Court opinions are available in several different formats, such as Supreme Court Reports (S.Ct.) and Lawyers Edition (L.Ed.2nd). It will be helpful if we all use the same format. We will use the official texts of Supreme Court opinions as reported in the United States Reports, published by the government and cited as ____ U.S. _____ ( ). Assignments will contain the name of a case and its U.S. Reports citation - - our first assigned case, for example, will be Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803).

The U.S. Reports are located on the main floor of the Law Library, Core section, Rows 24 and 25. Head Reference Librarian Marianne Alcorn suggests that the best way to get to the U.S. Reports on computer is to go to the law library homepage (www.law.asu.edu/library) and, in the Research Tools column, go to Recommended Databases. Choose HeinOnline, which lets you connect to Hein-On-Line: The Modern Link to Legal History. Choose U.S. Supreme Court Library in the Subscribed Libraries column. At this point there are two methods to retrieve the case from HeinOnline: 1. Select the tab at the top, "Citation Navigator" and type the volume of the U.S. Reports and page number into the template OR 2. Select U.S. Reports from the list and choose the appropriate volume of the U.S. Reports, in this case Volume 5, where you will find Marbury v. Madison listed in the Table of Contents as starting on p. 137, where you should find it.

When you read an assigned case, read the whole case, including all concurring opinions and dissents, if any. You may skip the official syllabus, if there is one. In cases decided early in the Court’s history, you may find that the official report starts with a summary of the lawyers’ arguments. You may skip that too, but you might find it interesting.

Teaching this course without a casebook is an experiment on my part. In addition to the excessive cost and weight of most Con Law casebooks these days, there are several other, more significant, reasons that led me to try this experiment. The most important of these is that the most valuable thing you can learn in this course is how independently to read, interpret, and think about constitutional provisions, statutes, and the judicial opinions interpreting and applying them. Casebooks present only edited (sometimes severely edited) versions of cases - - versions that contain only the parts of the opinions that the casebook editor thinks are most important. Casebooks also ordinarily surround most cases with the casebook editor’s opinion about what the case says and means. Because of these features, casebooks can get in the way of students learning how to figure out, for themselves, what the case holds, what it means, whether it is correct, etc. That, as I’ve said, is the most important thing you can learn to do in this course, and one good way to learn how to do it is to do it. Glitches are bound to occur as we try out the no-casebook approach. I hope you’ll bear with them.

First Assignment

To begin to learn how to get meaning from the U.S. Constitution, let’s try to find answers in the constitutional text to some interesting current issues that we might expect to be addressed in a constitution. Start by reading through the U.S. Constitution fairly quickly, from beginning to end (including the Amendments), to see how it is organized and to get a general idea about where provisions on various subjects are likely to be located. (The text of the Constitution is available in the Library and online in many places. Since every article and section is numbered, any accurate version will do. It will be important for you to be able to look at the constitutional text during class discussions.) Then answer the following questions on the basis of the constitutional text. (If you can’t find an answer in the Constitution, where would you find an answer?

Questions

1. Who had the constitutional right to vote in the November, 2008, presidential election?

2. The results of the November 4th presidential election were known almost immediately after the polls closed. Why will President-elect Obama not become President until January 20th?

3. When was Senator Obama actually elected?

4. After he becomes President, will President Obama be able to add a tenth member to the U.S. Supreme Court? Will he be able to designate which member of the Court will be Chief Justice?

5. Candidate Obama promised to lower taxes on the middle class. When will he be able to do that? He also said he would like to move U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. When will he be able to do that?

6. California voters voted in November to amend the California Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage in California. The California Supreme Court has been asked by proponents of same-sex marriage to invalidate that election. At the same time it has been asked by opponents of same-sex marriage to invalidate the same-sex marriages that took place in California prior to the November election. If the California Supreme Court does either of these things, will its decision be reviewable in the U.S. Supreme Court? If the U.S. Supreme Court does review either of these issues, what decision does the Constitution call for?

7. Hillary Clinton has been a member of the U.S. Senate for eight years. During that time, Congress raised the salaries of cabinet officers. Can she become Secretary of State?

8. The Governor of Illinois recently appointed someone to fill the vacancy that was created when Senator Obama resigned his Senate seat after the November election. The Governor has been accused by the U.S. Attorney in Illinois of trying to sell appointments to this Senate vacancy. Can a majority of the U.S. Senate keep the Governor’s appointee from becoming a member of the Senate? Why is the vacancy filled by a gubernatorial appointment, rather than an election?

9. Near the end of his term in office, President Bush issued a number of pardons. After publicly announcing that he had granted those pardons, the President changed his mind about one of them. A spokesperson for the President said that the President had signed the pardon, but that it had not been delivered to the prospective pardonee and would not be delivered. Has the person been pardoned? If that is uncertain, will President Obama be able to resolve the issue?

Tentative Syllabus

Here are the first several cases I am likely to assign, in case you want to look ahead. The list is probably going to change, depending on our experience with reading and discussing unedited cases. Some cases will be assigned in groups, so these cases will probably occupy about seven sessions.

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803)
McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819)
Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824)
U.S. v. E.C. Knight, 156 U.S. 1 (1895)
The Shreveport Rate Case, 234 U.S. 342 (1914)
Swift & Co. v. U.S.., 196 U.S. 375 (1905)
Champion v. Ames, 188 U.S. 321 (1903)
Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251
Schechter Poultry v. U.S., 295 U.S. 495 (1935)
Carter v. Carter Coal Co., 298 U.S. 238

1. The US Constitution (as amended) and identify all of the individual rights mentioned therein.

2. pp. 741-68 in the Casebook (Sullivan & Gunther, Constitutional Law, 16 edn.).

I look forward to seeing you in class.

Class 1—January 26, 2009—The debate over capital punishment.
Introduction, course requirements, and expectations.
Overview of the death penalty—leading up to Furman v Georgia.

Reading:
Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972)

For our first class, please prepare pages 1 to 40 of the casebook. You should also download the course syllabus from the Blackboard site for this class, and bring it with you to class.

Assignment for Monday, Jan. 26th 3:30 to 5:25 pm Rm 111

Read Chapters 1-3

Draft a one page letter seeking employment as either an Ass't US Attorney or an Ass't Federal Public Defender (you can assume any facts or experience needed).

Text:

Subin, Berke & Tirschwell, The Practice of Federal Criminal Law: Prosecution and Defense (2006 and any Supp).

This will be a mandatory organizational meeting. If you want to be in the seminar, please attend this meeting.

The start date of this course is being postponed. Professor Dickinson hopes to begin classes the week of February 2nd. Please plan on attending your first class on Monday February 2nd unless you receive another email stating otherwise. Because you will be missing three classes with this tentative start date, we will be scheduling make-up classes that at a minimum will be audiotaped. The make-up class schedule will be announced after the first class has started.

Professor Dickinson recently underwent heart surgery over winter break. She is doing well but needs more time to recuperate.

If you have any questions please feel free to email me (jenny.m.bishop@asu.edu) and I will forward the questions on to Professor Dickinson if I cannot answer them myself.

Class 1 January 23
-Intro to advocacy – Reading: Calleros: Chs. 15 & 16
-Research review – Reading: Herrera: 9-18; 51-61; 93-102
-CALR: Search Techniques – Reading: Calleros: Ch. 18, Herrera: 83-91; 46-49; 71-72; 109-121

Class 2 January 30
-Pleadings, Discovery & Court Rules – Reading: Calleros: Ex. 18-1, Calleros: Chapter 19

Jan. 22:
Calleros pages 317-41;
Herrera pages 9-18; 51-61; and 93-102;
Calleros pages 357-79; and
Herrera pages 83-91; 46-49; 71-72; and 109-21.

Jan. 29:
Calleros pages 381-419.

Feb. 5:
Calleros pages 343-56.

Feb. 12:
Bluebook Rules 10 & 12 & Bluepages.

I'll see you all on the 22nd!

In ABA Rules: Preamble; scope; MR 8.1, MRs 5.1-5.3, 8.3

Additional materials to obtain and read:
In re Hamm, 211 Ariz. 458, 123 P.3d 652 (2005)
In re King, 212 Ariz. 559, 136 P.3d 878 (2006)

1. Read the updated version of Chapter 1 of the casebook, Science in Evidence. Also read the following Federal Rules of Evidence: Rules 201, 401, 402, 403, and 702-706 together with the accompanying Advisory Committee Notes; Rules 801-805 (Advisory Committee Notes for these are optional). The materials can viewed or downloaded by following the links for the Scientific Evidence class at http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~kayed/class/class.html. (Be sure to read the updated version of the chapter posted on my website rather than the earlier version in the textbook. You also can get to these materials from the course site on Blackboard.)

2. Be prepared to answer the follower questions in class about Miller v. Pate:

A. What are the facts of the case?

B. Which of the above rules of evidence support admitting the testimony of the chemist from the State Bureau of Criminal Investigation?

C. Suppose the chemist had prepared a written report stating his findings and that the state called the head of the laboratory rather than the chemist to testify to these results. Under the rules listed above, would the report have been admissible in evidence?

D. How did this case reach the United States Supreme Court? Was it a direct appeal from a criminal conviction or something else? Why does this matter?

E. (1) What did the Supreme Court hold? (2) What other grounds for granting relief to the defendant, if any, have merit? (3) How does this case differ from Arizona v. Youngblood, 488 U.S. 51 (1988)?

F. What, if anything, should the legal system do to avoid travesties of justice like that in Miller?

Assume that you are a young trial attorney assigned to second chair the trial of the Pappas v.Wheelock case on behalf of the plaintiff. [Case file A-6 of the Text] Draft a case evaluation memorandum for the lead trial attorney not to exceed 5 pages. The memorandum should address, among other items, your proposed theory of the case and reasons why, as well as your proposed case theme and reasons why.

In addition, be prepared to discuss in class the ethical considerations raised in Section 3.5 of the Text.

Carlson & Imwinkelreid, Dynamics of Trial Practice: Problems and Materials (3rd ed. 2002 & Supp);

Imwinkelreid, Evidentiary Foundations (7th ed. 2008).

Assignment for Jan.26th: Dynamics of Trial Practice Chptrs 1-3