Bonus: local privacy/exclusionary rule news

The Washington State Supreme Court limits the kinds of searches that law enforcement can conduct, in the Seattle PI.

HW for 5/21: An economic liberty puzzle

Minimum wage laws require that employers pay employees no less than a certain hourly wage. (In Washington, the minimum wage is currently $8.07/hour.)

In effect, this denies workers the freedom to work for whatever wage they are willing to work for.

To illustrate this, let's say the Acme Widget Company hires John Boolihan for $8.07 an hour. I'm unemployed, and really need some work, and I'd be happy to do his job for $7/hour. But the law prohibits Acme Widget and me from entering into a contract for that mutually agreed-upon price.

If Acme and I can reach a bargain, why should the state be able to butt in and say that we can't? Seems to me that's a violation of the "liberty" guaranteed by the 5th and 14th amendments. Shouldn't I be able to work for whatever I want to work for?

In the comments, make an argument for why minimum wage laws do not violate the Constitution.

Bonus: Cell phone 4A question

When police obtain cell phone records without a warrant in order to help someone in danger, does it violate the Fourth Amendment? See this P-I article.

Bonus: Privacy issue on WA State Ferries

As mentioned in class today, you can listen to the NPR story on random citizenship checks.

HW for 5/7: Constitutional Amendments

Amending the Constitution is hard -- it has only been done successfully 15 times in the last 200 years. The process was designed to make it difficult.

Taking into account what you've learned about law and the Constitution over the last eight months, write an amendment that you would like to see added to the Constitution.

Post the text of your amendment in the comments.

Massachussetts v. EPA (environmental)

Massachusetts petitioned the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from new motor vehicles under the Clean Air Act which states that "any air pollutant" that can "reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare" must be regulated. The EPA denied this petition, saying that even if they were authorized to regulate carbon dioxide, they didn't have to until further research was done. Massachusetts appealed this denial to the Court Of Appeals, which sided with the EPA. They appealed then to The Supreme Court, which reversed the decision by a 5-4 vote with Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer for Mass., and Stevens wrote the decision, stating that Massachussetts had a "stake in protecting its quasi-sovereign interests" and therefore had a right to sue the EPA for potentially failing to protect it's territory from poison. Roberts dissented, saying that carbon dioxide's damaging qualities were not proven, and Scalia dissented saying that the clean air act was intended to combat "conventional lower-atmosphere pollutants," not global climate change.

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (War Powers--Military Commissions

Salim Ahmed Hamdan was a Yemeni citizen who formerly worked at an agricultural project that Osama Bin Laden created, was captured and sent to Guantanamo Bay after the invasion of Afghanistan. The Bush administration charged him in 2004 of conspiracy to commit terrorism and wanted to try him before a military commission (military commissions strip detainees of many civil rights they would have in a regular trial). The Supreme Court decided 5-3 that military commissions violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions and that President Bush didn’t have the congressional authority to try detainees though them. Justice Stevens wrote the majority opinion, with two concurrences written by Breyer and Kennedy, and the three dissenters—Scalia, Thomas, and Alito each writing their own dissents. Chief Justice Roberts didn’t take part in this case because he was on the three person panel which previously considered it on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.