Link to Onassis v. Christian Dior Inc.

Here is a link to the opinion in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis v. Christian Dior-New York, Inc.

Federalist Papers Video Contest Winners

Here are the winning and runner-up entries in the Federalist Papers Video Contest. First place goes to Mason Badger, Andrea Richardson, Ben Gothman, and Kate Rowland.





Second place goes to Nathan Gutekunst, Sarah Shaffer, and Heather Fox.





I was unable to whittle the set of finalists to just five, so there are four other entries in this category.

Finalist 1: Sarah Camba, Elizabeth Tindle, Natalie Mitchell, and Natalie Marshall

Finalist 2: Hussain Al-Ismail and Ameer Al-Dagher

Finalist 3: Feliper Flores and Luis Flores

Finalist 4: Misty Canet, Luke Pyburn, Payton Duvall-Freymuller, and Jacob Ledbetter

Congratulations to you all. The entries were very good this year, and making selections was very difficult.

I am also grateful to everyone else who entered the contest. It takes a great deal of thought and effort to produce a video, and, as a group, you all showed an incredible amount of work and talent.

Extra Credit

I will conduct course evaluations in class on Tuesday. If at least 50% of the students enrolled in a section complete a course evaluation, I will award one point of extra credit on the final grade of every student in that section. The extra credit opportunity is available to both sections.

Extra Credit Opportunity for Exam 3

So, this semester, I have placed new emphasis on The Federalist in the course. In the hope of inspiring you all to improve your understanding of that material and commit it to long-term memory (and to try to harness your creativity to help me come up with a better way to teach this stuff), students who produce a video explaining and demonstrating an original way to remember the arguments in Federalists 10, 46, 51, and 78 can win extra credit that may be applied to your third exam.

Here are the rules:

1. An entry may be no longer than 5 minutes.
2. Each entry must provide instruction on the four Federalist essays described above.
3. Entries may be the work of individual students or teams. (Students may collaborate across sections.)
4. Teams may be no larger than 4 students.
4. No student may be involved in more than one entry.
5. Entries must be burned onto a CD-ROM in a common video file format (e.g. .mpg, .mov, etc.).
6. All entries are must be physically turned in to me no later than the start of the entrant or entrants' class on Monday, April 30. Be sure to write the names of all students' responsible for the video on the physical disc.

I will select up to five finalist entries on the basis of three criteria: the usefulness of the video for helping future students learn the assigned Federalist essays (60%), creativity (25%), and production values (15%). I will choose one winning video and one runner-up from among the finalists.

• Individuals or teams who produce the three finalist videos will receive 4 points of extra credit (per person). 
• The person or team who produces the runner-up video will receive 8 points of extra credit (per person). 
• The person or team who produces the winning video will receive 12 points of extra credit (per person).

All extra credit will be applied to grades for the third exam prior to any curves or other adjustments I may make. By submitting a video, entrants agree to assign to me the nonexclusive right to publish and distribute their video (including posting it online, making it available for others to download, and showing it in present and future classes) and to incorporate ideas and material from the videos into lectures and other teaching products. Lastly, and as always, I am the dictator of the extra credit assignment. My interpretation of the rules is final, and I reserve the right to alter or amend its terms at any time with reasonable notice.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this opportunity. Good luck.

Office Hours Cancelled Today, April 18

I am *very* sorry for this last minute change, but I will not be able to make my office hours today in order to attend to a family medical situation.

I will hold extra office hours tomorrow from 2:00PM-400PM in my office on West Campus (in addition to my usual office hours from 10-00AM-12:00PM) and also on Friday afternoon from 1:00PM-4:00PM in Evans Library.

Again, I am very sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, and I hope you will be able to attend one of these makeup times. If not, please let me know, and I can schedule individual appointments as necessary.

SMD Video

Today, we talked about the relationship between a country's electoral rules and the number of political parties that enjoy significant levels of electoral support. This video may help you get a handle on the SMD system, which the video refers to as "first past the post," which refers to deciding elections by plurality rule.

Marbury v. Madison Lives

Though, as we discussed in class, the history of judicial review in the United States cannot reasonably be reduced to "John Marshall created in in Marbury v. Madison," the myth of Marbury remains a persistent part of the country's political folklore. For example, David Franklin (Associate Professor of Law and Vice Deal at DePaul University) invokes Marbury in this article arguing that the Supreme Court should decide not to decide the health care cases by declaring that it has no jurisdiction to do so. Leaving aside the merits of the author's claims about the Court's jurisdiction in the health care cases, here is how he describes Marbury:

More than 200 years ago, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that was destined to change the landscape of American politics and send generations of befuddled first-year law students scurrying to their legal dictionaries. Everyone knows Marbury v. Madison as the case in which the court first asserted the power to declare acts of Congress and the president unconstitutional. What’s less well known is that the defendants in Marbury (Secretary of State James Madison and, by extension, President Thomas Jefferson) got off on a technicality. In its first great clash with the president, the court concluded that it had no jurisdiction—no power, in other words, to award relief to the plaintiff. Marbury promised sizzle and ended with fizzle.

But all of this was by design. John Marshall, the brilliant but unassuming chief justice, always intended to use Marbury to hand his cousin and arch-foe Jefferson a narrow legal victory while dealing him a long-lasting political blow. By lecturing Jefferson about his legal duties, Marshall put the president in his place. (Ours is “a government of laws, and not of men.”) And by laying the foundation for judicial review, Marshall carved out a prominent new place for the court. Most important, Marshall did all of this without ordering Madison or Jefferson to actually do anything. No wonder historian Robert McCloskey called Marbury “a masterwork of indirection.”

Like I told you all in class, when someone says Marbury v. Madison, the easiest thing to do is to nod knowingly and say, "Ah yes, John Marshall, judicial review, I know it well." You are also welcome, though, to join me in my personal crusade to put Marbury in its proper place and explain to your learned friends about the Repeal Act, Stuart v. Laird, and ongoing politics of constructing judicial independence.