Gah, Con Law. It was a 24 hour take-home. I picked it up at 2 PM yesterday. I turned it in just before 1 PM today. I spent 22 of the intervening 23 hours working on it. Man, that was a crazy final. But now I'm done. I have ceremonially moved my Consitutional Law folder in OneNote from the Current Classes folder to the Old Classes folder. Whee! Only Rule of Law, Property, and the writing competition stand between me and freedom.
For those interested, here's the gist of my Con Law final questions. Note that there are more details in the final; the actual final was about 7 full typed pages.
1. There's this college, very elite, a state school. They didn't accept women until 1962. Until then, women all went to a women-only sister school. Now they do accept women. Lots of them. So many, that the class make-up this year is 59% women and 41% men. This seems to be a product of fewer men applying to college, or something. Noone really knows. But they're worried because, once a school's sex alignment gets too far out of whack, students get less interested in the school and the applicant pool gets smaller, and thus lower in quality. Anyhow: They decide to implement Affirmative Action for Men. They use a point system for admissions, with different GPAs and SAT scores giving certain points for hard factors, and then up to thirty points for soft factors. They decided to give all male applicants a bonus three points for soft factors. As a result, the new incoming class is 49% men, 51% women.
You're approached by a young, successful woman who applied to the school and was denied admission. Analyze her chances of winning a claim that that the school's admissions program violated her Equal Protection rights.
2. In an attempt to increase the rate of organ donations, your state has just passed a law declaring all internal organs the property of the state upon death. That is, from now on, whenever somebody dies, the body becomes the property of the state until any healthy organs can be extracted. After the state has no more use for your body, it will be returned to your next of kin for burial or disposal. The state Shinto society objects to mandatory organ donation, as it violates a number of their death rituals. They come to you. Assess the various paths you might use to attack the law's constitutionality.
3. This Fall, the Democrats sweep into controll of Congress. They immediately start a constitutional food-fight with the President. In a rider to a mandatory debt-limit raising bill, they attach a rider that 1. abolishes the position of Secretary of Defense and fires the current holder of the office 2. Establishes the new position of Secretary of Peace, which has the exact same duties as Secretary of Defense, and which will have all of the same personnel, but will need a new Secretary to head it. 3. officially repeals the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraw. 4. Declares that the Defense department may not spend any money that has been or will be appropriated in the future on offensive operations in Iraq; only spending on immediate, rapid withdrawal of military forces will be tolerated. 5. Anyone, including armed forces members, in any way injured as a result of the violation of the previous provisions has a cause of action, for triple damages, against anyone involved, directly or indirectly, in violating that provision, including the highest civilian supervisor of the armed forces, but not including the President. Any previous immunities to lawsuit are hereby lifted. 6. You can bring this suit in any court, state or federal.
President Bush signs the bill, because they need to raise the debt ceiling. But in doing so he issues a signing statement saying that he refuses to comply by its unconstitutional terms, he considers every part of the relevant section null and void, but that out of respect for Congress the Secretary of Defense will now be known as the Secretary of Peace. Donald Rumsfeld remains defiance and continues offensive operations against insurgents in Iraq.
The day after the signing, a young private is killed in Iraq during a raid on an insurgent hideout. They day after, your parents come to you asking to sue Donald Rumsfeld for triple wrongful death damages in Massachusetts Superior Court. Explain to them all the constitutional problems that bringing such a claim would raise.
