Supreme Court Chart and Article Summary

1. Pick one of the follow Supreme Court cases: Texas v. Johnson (p. 130) or Snyder v. Phelps (p. 137).

2. Read the case carefully. Read the opinion of the court and one dissent. Ignore concurrences or additionaldissents. Highlight or note the important passages. There may be much in the case that is technical. Don’tworry about that stuff. Be on the look out for the big statements, especially those that show how the Courtis interpreting the part of the Constitution in question. Notice the kind of quotes I picked in the examples Igave you.3. Chart

a. In an excel document, input the Case information

i. Case nameii. Case ID (e.g. 347 US 483)
iii. One-paragraph summary of the Facts of the case (in your own words)
iv. Constitutional Question (you can get from the opinion or websites like www.oyez.com,www.findlaw.com)v. One paragraph summary in your own words of the holding. Include the vote count, 9-0,8-1, 7-2, 6-3, 5-4 and a basic summary of the Court’s answer to the constitutionalquestion.

b. Then your document should have three columns – one for the subject matter or issue, one for theOpinion of the Court and one for any one of the dissents. For this assignment, cut and paste onlythe most important quotations from the case as has been done in the example I have given. Thekey is to be able to match up points made in the dissent with points made in the Court’s opinion. Itis this upon which you will be graded. You should have at least 10 quotations for the Opinion ofthe Court and 10 quotations for the dissenters. Again, only include the most decisivequotations. The quotations should not be any longer than three sentences. Do not concernyourself with earlier Supreme Court decisions, or issues in the lower court decisions, just focus onquotes in the decision that analyze the constitution or make big statements about rights and

justice.

c. For the chart portion of the assignment, I have given you examples from Court cases that I havedone.

4. Read one high quality journal article about your case or the issue in your case (e.g. privacy, abortion, capitalpunishment). This article should be from law reviews or academic journals, etc.. The article must be atleast 10 pages in length. On a separate page of the assignment (in a word document) summarize thearticle in two paragraphs in your own words. It should be well-written and be a clear presentation of themain argument of the author and his understanding of the case. Upload the article itself to Canvas in theform of a PDF or a doc so I can read the article. Do not just include a link. You may not use materialpublished as blogs or entries on websites. It must be a published article in a law review or a journal. For thispart, you may use Lexis Nexus or JSTOR or any other academic search engine in the library’s electronicresources. You may also use an approved article sent to me by email ahead of time. If you have any doubtabout whether your article is a good one, email me.

Example:

Opinion of the Court

Dissenters

RULE OF LAW
RULE OF LAW
STRICT SCRUTINYSTRICT SCRUTINY It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. 2

22. In the dilemma that he dare not remain in his home, orvoluntarily leave the area, without incurring criminal penalties,and that the only way he could avoid punishment was to go to anAssembly Center and submit himself to military imprisonment,the petitioner did nothing… MURPHY

Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocaioncenters -- and we deem it unjusiiable to call them concentraioncamps, with all the ugly connotaions that term implies -- we aredealing speciically with nothing but an exclusion order 15

26. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that, had the peiioneratempted to…leave the military area in which he lived, hewould have been arrested and tried and convicted. The twoconlicing orders, one which commanded him to stay and theother which commanded him to go, were nothing but a cleverlydevised trap to accomplish the real purpose of the militaryauthority, which was to lock him up in a concentraion camp.MURPHY

all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racialgroup are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all suchrestrictions are unconstitutional 2

5 / 5

Opinion of the Court

Dissenters

RULE OF LAW
RULE OF LAW
STRICT SCRUTINYSTRICT SCRUTINY It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. 2

22. In the dilemma that he dare not remain in his home, orvoluntarily leave the area, without incurring criminal penalties,and that the only way he could avoid punishment was to go to anAssembly Center and submit himself to military imprisonment,the petitioner did nothing… MURPHY

Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocaioncenters -- and we deem it unjusiiable to call them concentraioncamps, with all the ugly connotaions that term implies -- we aredealing speciically with nothing but an exclusion order 15

26. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that, had the peiioneratempted to…leave the military area in which he lived, hewould have been arrested and tried and convicted. The twoconlicing orders, one which commanded him to stay and theother which commanded him to go, were nothing but a cleverlydevised trap to accomplish the real purpose of the militaryauthority, which was to lock him up in a concentraion camp.MURPHY

all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racialgroup are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all suchrestrictions are unconstitutional 2