| Political Science 417 Professor Kritzer |
| Spring 2006-07 Oral Argument |
We will hold simulated oral arguments for four cases currently pending before the Supreme Court. The first week I will ask each student to provide me with a preference list for both cases and roles. The roles will be attorney for the petitioner, attorney for the respondent, and justice (I will play the role of Chief Justice). For each case there will be a team of 3-4 attorneys for each side and 4 or 5 justices (assigned randomly to be conservative, moderate, or liberal). In addition two students will appear representing the Solicitor General's office as "friends of the court" (amicus curae) for each case.
The responsibilities of the attorneys will be to prepare an oral argument. Each time should meet and split up the argument into logical pieces based on their analysis of the case; each attorney on the time should be assigned one aspect of the argument to research and prepare (some initial research will be necessary to come up with a way to analyze the case). Each attorney should come to the oral argument with a detailed outline (3-5 pages) of the argument he or she wishes to make. The team should prepare a one to two page memo explaining who has responsibility for each of the issues identified.
The responsibilities of the justices is to identify the key questions that a justice of his or her ideology would be most concerned about. Each justice should prepare a "bench memo" of 3-5 pages outlining what the justice thinks the key issues and the questions the justice will want the attorneys to address. Justices with a common perspective may work together in doing research, but each justice must prepare his or her own bench memo.
Each attorney will get approximately 8 minutes to present his/her argument. Before the argument starts, one member of the team should give the justices the memo showing how the team has divided the argument and briefly (2 or 3 minutes) explain it to the justices. Attorneys should not simply read from their outlines.
The justices may interrupt at any time to ask questions; justices should take care to direct their questions to the attorney whose responsibility aligns most closely with the question. If a justice has a question that does not clearly align with any attorney's subtask, that question may be directed to any attorney; the attorney may tell the justice that one of the attorneys yet to speak will address that issue.
Copies of the memos showing the division of the tasks, the oral argument outlines, and the bench memos must be given to the Chief Justice at the beginning of the session.
The team representing the petitioners position will present its argument first; followed by the respondent. The representatives of the Solicitor General's office, appearing as amicus curae, will speak last.
In preparation for the oral argument, you will need to read a number of cases. Below I provide specific cases you may find of use; you will find other cases of interest as you prepare. There are two on-line resources for accessing cases:
Findlaw (Findlaw.com) which is a publicly available website accessible from any computer.
and
Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe which can be accessed through the University Library website.
With Lexis-Nexis, click on "Legal Research"; you can then retrieve cases by "citation" or "party name" (click on "get a case"). You can also do various free form searches for cases by clicking on "Federal Case Law" or "State Case Law" depending on whether you want to search decisions by federal courts or state courts (for the latter, you need to specify the state you want to look at).
Briefs can be accessed in several ways
You should get a list of the briefs that have been filed to day, many of which will be amicus briefs. You will need to look through the list to identify the Petitioner's Brief (on the merits) and the Respondent's brief; there may also be a brief on behalf of the United States as Amicus (Solicitor General).