The Law and the Courts

   For next time:

• Wurman, ch. 7-8, epilogue.
• Federalist # 84
• The Seneca Falls Declaration,  http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/senecafalls.asp

Appellate Courts

• The Structure
• Guide to Supreme Court decisions
• The Senate and Supreme Court nominations
• SCOTUS has 7 members Catholic or raised Catholic, 2 Jewish members.
• Tocqueville (p. 270): “There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one”  
• One example of many:  the travel ban.
• Judging and history (Wurman, ch. 6) and sense v. application (pp. 38-40)

The Dangers of the Law

• Tocqueville (p. 267): "Our written laws are often hard to understand, but everyone can read them, whereas nothing could be more obscure and out of reach of the common man than a law founded on precedent.”
• Prosecutorial discretion
• Three felonies a day

Juries

• The "joy" of jury duty
• My jury experience
• Tocqueville (p. 275):

Juries invest each citizen with a sort of magisterial office; they make all men feel that they have duties toward society and that they take a share in its government. By making men pay attention to things other than their own affairs, they combat that individual selfishness which is like rust in society.

Juries are wonderfully effective in shaping a nation’s judgment and increasing its natural lights. That, in my view, is its greatest advantage. It should be regarded as free school which is always open and in which each juror learns his rights, comes into daily contact with the best-educated and most-enlightened members of the upper classes, and is given practical lessons in the law, lessons which the advocate’s efforts, the judge’s advice, and also the very passions of the litigants bring within his mental grasp. I think that the main reason for the practical intelligence and the political good sense of the Americans is their long experience with juries in civil cases.