Imagine that you are a Supreme Court justice and have been assigned the task of writing the opinion of the court inUnited States v. Bates

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. Your opinion of the court should be your appraisal of how, based on the issues raised in the Bates case and the precedents available to the Supreme Court, the case should be decided. Your paper should not be simply your personal views of how the Court should rule. Instead, it should be a logical justification for what you believe the Court's decision should be rooted in both the issues raised and the available precedents. This paper should build upon, but not simply repeat and copy from, the Lesson 11 paper about the precedents relevant to the Bates case. In preparing this assignment you should take into account any comments I may have made about your Lesson 11 paper. You should also review the lecture that was posted about Bates in Lesson 11.

The first page of your opinion should be a concise summary of the background to the Bates case. This should include details about the Equal Access Act, what the lower courts ruled and the claims that Bates has raised about the law's constitutionality. Your opinion announcing the Supreme Court's ruling should discuss the relevant precedents and justify why the ones you have selected are the most appropriate and thus most controlling of how the case should be decided.Don't just summarize these previous cases. Your discussion should show how the principles derived from these precedents help determine how Bates should be decided. Again, the paper should not be your own personal view of how you personally feel about this issue. Nor is the relevant question whether you think Congress should have passed the Public Accommodations Equal Access Act in the first place or whether the act is wise legislation. If fact, if you were a member of Congress you might have voted against it. Rather, the issue is whether the legislation is a constitutional use of the Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce. How you frame this problem is found in the Supreme Court precedents dealing with the commerce power. For this assignment you a a judge, not a legislator. To present an effective paper you should review the details of the Bates case. I strongly recommend too that you review the Supreme Court's decisions in the Epstein and Walker book dealing with the power of Congress in Article I, Section 8 to regulate interstate commerce. Some of the cases included in the book expand Congress' commerce power, while others restrict it. Take the time needed to make sure you follow the ebb and flow of the national commerce doctrine and how the individual cases may relate to how Bates might be decided. Clearly, some cases are more relevant than others. Box 7.9 in the Epstein and Walker chapter on the national commerce power provides a summary of several important commerce decisions. As you review the cases note that Justice Scalia's concurring opinion inGonzales v. RaichLinks to an external site.provides a cogent summary of commerce clause issues and especially the relationship between the commerce power and the necessary and proper clause in Article I, Section 8. I encourage you to read Scalia's opinion. A potion of his opinion is reprinted in the assigned reading but it should be helpful to carefully review his full opinion in the case.