POL 462H

Class Project

Spring, 2008

 

 

The class project in this course involves a significant piece of original research and analysis relating to a topic of constitutional law selected by each student. The focus of this Project is for each student to explore some aspect of U.S. constitutional law that relates to some feature of the Constitutional Doctrine surrounding freedom of expression, as it has developed within the framework of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

 

The focus of this research project involves each student reading extensively in the secondary, law review literature on the topic, identify and analyze the relevant court (particularly Supreme Court) cases that deal with the topic, and prepare the written analysis of the topic.

 

The schedule for this Project is for students to devote about three weeks to identifying and narrowing down a topic. That means that by March 31, 2008, the topic for each student’s Project should be selected, and approved after discussion with and agreement by the instructor. It is suggested that initially students select three possible topics, and prepare enough on each of those so that they can make the case for using that topic for the Project. In the course of developing and selecting a topic, by this date, students should have uncovered the secondary literature on the topic and mastered the core of that literature. At the time the topic is discussed and selected with the instructor, students should have developed an extensive bibliography of materials – secondary literature and court cases – that they will analyze for the Project.

 

The next deadline is April 18th. By this date students should have completed and submitted a rough draft of their Research Paper. These will be read and evaluated by the instructor, and returned so that students can re-write the final version of the paper no later than Monday April 28, 2008 at 3:20 PM in BRNG 1206. That is when the Final Examination is scheduled. The table below indicates these deadlines more graphically:

 

Project Deadline

Task

March 31, 2008

Discussion and Selection of Paper Topic

April 18, 2008

Submission of Rough Draft of Paper

April 28, 2008

Submission of Revised, Final Version of the Paper

 

General topics connected to interaction between branches of the national government that relate to the Project Paper might include the following. These suggestions are much too broad and general to serve as the precise paper topics for the Project. Students are expected to select a narrow issue that relates to one of these:

 

·        First Amendment Protection of Commercial Speech

·        Hate Speech and its Regulation under the First Amendment

·        Libel and the First Amendment

·        Expression and the Internet

·        Regulation of Content versus Censorship

·        Content versus Time, Manner and Place Regulation of Speech

·        Symbolic Speech and Its Protection

 

The way to select a narrow topic for the Project Paper is to examine the recent Supreme Court decisions on the subject (as contained in O’Brien) and to read the relevant portions of O’Brien’s text on the subject. Then, explore the subsequent Court decisions that are not contained in O’Brien. That is decisions on the subject that have been rendered since the publication of O’Brien’s 6th edition (2005). In addition, both Fallon and Currie have treatments of the First Amendment and Speech in general. These secondary treatments will provide you with very sound summaries and treatments of the material we have been covering in class and they should provide you with some ideas about how to approach or analyze the subject. The core feature of any topic proposed or selected for the Project is that it relates to an issue of Constitutional Law.

 

In addition, to these preliminary matters, students should immediately conduct a comprehensive electronic search for secondary literature (largely this will be law review materials) that relate to the potential topics that are of interest. These searches should include searching:

 

 

The first two of these data-bases includes a limited set of law reviews. However, you can not only identify relevant literature through searching these data bases, but also obtain PDF or HTML versions of the materials themselves. The last of these items, the Index to Legal Periodicals, is a comprehensive index to all articles published in law reviews. (The trouble with that is unless Purdue subscribes to a hardcopy or an electronic version of the Law Review, you cannot quickly read the actual publications.) I believe the links above will get you to each of these immediately, and that may perhaps speed up your searches.

 

N.B. you must be signed onto the Purdue Computer System in order to use the links provided above.

 

After identifying apparently relevant materials you should quickly obtain and read the core (8-12) articles that relate to the subject you are interested in exploring. That should provide you with a substantial basis for the analysis of a set of current Supreme Court (and lower court) decisions that relate to your topic. The importance of this secondary literature is to provide you with various analytic frameworks that you can use for analyzing the cases. The end result will be your analysis of the cases (both Supreme Court and lower court) that resolve various legal issues focused on the selected topic. The importance of the framework is that it provides a consistent and comprehensive analytic perspective for your analysis. Your paper will present (1) a clear and developed analytic perspective for treating the doctrine you have selected, (2) a discussion of a set of cases (both decided by the Supreme Court and by lower courts) that pertain to the subject you are exploring, and (3) an analysis of these cases using the framework to explain the outcomes and the inconsistencies in outcomes in these cases that emerge from the application of the framework.

 

The Mechanics of the Final Paper are as follows.

 

  1. Submit two copies of the paper. (One copy will be returned or available for pick up during Finals Week.)
  2. The paper is to be double spaced.
  3. The paper is to have a title page that contains the title of the paper, the author’s name, the course, and the date.
  4. All subsequent pages of the paper (after the title page) are to be numbered, consecutively.
  5. The paper is to be footnoted. Footnotes are to comply with the form of either the Blue Book or the Maroon Book. (That means you do not need to provide a bibliography or a list of references. All the material you have consulted will be contained in your footnote citations.)
  6. On the first page of text, after the Title of the paper, provide an italicized Abstract, of no more than 150 words.
  7. Immediately following the Abstract, the paper is to contain a Table of Contents.
  8. The paper should contain sections, and perhaps sub-sections, that clearly display the organization and the systematic treatment of the topic that is treated in the paper. These sections should break the paper into parts, and they should correspond to the headings in the Table of Contents.
  9. The Paper is due no later than the beginning of class on Monday, April 28, 2007 at the indicated time and place.