As I am currently focusing on academic writing, my first step was to begin doing research.  I have found that the Helmke Library's online databases and indexes can be extremely helpful tools for research.  The one that I like to use the most is JSTOR, which is located at http://www.jstor.org/.  The site has a huge collection of scholarly articles that span a wide array of academic topics.  Some of the articles were written almost 100 years ago and some were written a few months ago.  In addition, the site is easy to navigate and allows several ways to arrange your findings.  I have already found several interesting articles about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights on JSTOR.  Hopefully, I will be able to use some of the articles for my paper.

The only problem, really, with JSTOR is that sometimes there are simply too many articles on the topic you are looking for.  I do not mean that in the sense that you have to make sure you are being specific with search terms.  Even when entering a fairly specific search it is easy to be overwhelmed by the number of articles that are returned.  Luckily, they bring up the ones that most closely match your search first.  Even with the abundance of articles, it is much nicer to have a plethora of information than not enough.

For February I have continued to try and limit my topic for my research paper.  I have decided that the best way to do that is to find which part of the First Amendment I would like to do a comparative piece on.  To help me with my search, I turned to lexis nexis academic at http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic.  Lexis Nexis academic has some of the best legal documents available online.  To search through hundreds of academic journals and court cases collected all you have to do is go to the site and then "click" the legal check box before entering a search.  The website also has to distinct ways to search for information on the site.  The first is a general search where any combination of words can be entered and the results that most closely match what was entered will be displayed.  This is a good place to start, but there is an even more efficient way to search for informationon Lexis Nexis.  The best way to search the site is with "terms and connectors".  If I wanted to investigate some current issues on the establishment clause this is a very important tool to have.  If I merely searched for the establishment clause I would easily have over ten thousand hits on the website.  However, it is possible to refine the search to come up with articles that are more geared towards what I am interested in.  For instance, I can make sure that the word establishment and the word clause appear side by side at least ten times in the article.  This will ensure that the article is actually talking about the establishment clause and, if mentioned over ten times in the article, is probably a pretty significant portion of it.  Lexis Nexis also allows you to pick what time period you want to search in and whether you want to search court cases (at all different levels) or if you want to search legal journals from all over the country.   

For March, I have really begun to get into my project for Writing Research and Methods.  I have decided to focus my project on the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.  The only problem is that, with many types of legal research, finding organized information can be quite difficult.  While I'm not sure how many of you will be doing any kind of legal research for your projects, I think that Helmke library has many good research tools for students.  The best and most comprehensive, yet broadest, place to begin searching for legal information can be found in an unexpected place at Helmke Library.  If you go to class study guides and scroll down to Political Science, you will be able to find a Course Guide for the class Y490 senior seminar class, "First Amendment".  Even though the guide is for the First Amendment, many of the websites don't just cover the first amendment, but many different areas of the law.  Some of the best websites that there are links to include http://www.lib.ipfw.edu/1376.0.html  which offers a comprehensive history of the Supreme Court and all of the great Justices that have served over the years.  The site also includes a quick link to http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic, which I have alluded to in an earlier post as being a great place, not just for legal research, but for any kind of research you might be interested in as a student.  There are also website links that connect students to more obscure district court and appeal court cases that can be quite difficult to find by just doing more broad searches on sites like google or yahoo.  It also provides a link to one of my favorite places to do research on the web.  The website I discussed in class last week, when we had to each come up with a primary resource database to bring to class.  My was FindLaw, and the site is located at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment01/

Find Law has one of the largest collections of cases that I have been able to find on the internet.  Even if you are not doing any research on legal topics, it is still a fascinating website to search.  Of all the websites I had visited, FindLaw was the most helpful for me in limiting my topic on Free Exercise down to something manageable.  Covering the Free Exercise clause would take hundreds of pages of writing, but the website helped me narrow it down to a much more reasonable topic.  I am now going to be examining the different sort of interpretation given to the Free Exercise Clause over the United States' history. 

As far as the rest of the course guide goes, there are several other interesting websites and information about the library that could prove to be quite helpful to all students.  For political science, we luckily have a great librarian that is terrific about setting up comprehensive course guides for students at all levels.  It's so easy to get lost in the process of doing a major research paper, but those course guides make it much easier for students to get off on the right foot as they begin to do research on their topic.

Another place, that I have really enjoyed visiting is Cornell's online law collection.  I mean wow, I hope IU's online collection is as comprehensive as this site.  The site can be located at http://www.law.cornell.edu/ and has a plethora of decisions from the Supreme Court.  The site covers way more then that though, you can also search places like the US Legal Code and lower court decisions as well.  The internet has truly become the best place to locate information for research projects (but I guess if we have to put up with sites like YouTube then there better be some positive benefit to it).  As I have discussed over the course of my Wiki contributions to this class there is now a plethora of ways that one can do legal research over the internet.  I can't imagine how difficult or limited I would have been doing a project like this even ten years ago.  the sites have made it so that the only real problem a student has is that sometimes it seems like there can be almost too much information to be covered.  I know that can seem like a good problem to have, but last semester when I did my seminar paper over the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, all of the information was more than just a little overwhelming, at times, it was almost intimidating.  However, once you familiarize yourself with it, like with anything else, you tend to get better at managing all the information and still finding the pieces you need for your paper. 

Below is a sample of a case at the Cornell online law collection:

Syllabus

NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued.The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader.See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321 .

SNYDER v. LOUISIANA

certiorari to the supreme court of louisiana

During voir dire in petitioner’s capital murder case, the prosecutor used peremptory strikes to eliminate black prospective jurors who had survived challenges for cause. The jury convicted petitioner and sentenced him to death. Both on direct appeal and on remand in light of Miller-El v. Dretke, 545 U. S. 231 , the Louisiana Supreme Court rejected petitioner’s claim that the prosecution’s peremptory strikes of certain prospective jurors, including Mr. Brooks, were based on race, in violation of Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U. S. 79 .

Held: The trial judge committed clear error in rejecting the Batson objection to the strike of Mr. Brooks. Pp. 3–13.

    (a) Under Batson’s three-step process for adjudicating claims such as petitioner’s, (1) a defendant must make a prima facie showing that the challenge was based on race; (2) if so, “ ‘the prosecution must offer a race-neutral basis for striking the juror in question’ ”; and (3) “ ‘in light of the parties’ submissions, the trial court must determine whether the defendant has shown purposeful discrimination.’ ” Miller-El, supra, at 277 (Thomas, J., dissenting) (quoting Miller-El v. Cockrell, 537 U. S. 322 ). Unless it is clearly erroneous, the trial court’s ruling must be sustained on appeal. The trial court’s role is pivotal, for it must evaluate the demeanor of the prosecutor exercising the challenge and the juror being excluded. Pp. 3–4.

    (b) While all of the circumstances bearing on the racial-animosity issue must be consulted in considering a Batson objection or reviewing a ruling claimed to be a Batson error, the explanation given for striking Mr. Brooks, a college senior attempting to fulfill his student-teaching obligation, is insufficient by itself and suffices for a Batson error determination. Pp. 4–13.

        (1) It cannot be presumed that the trial court credited the prosecution’s first race-neutral reason, that Mr. Brooks looked nervous. Deference is owed to a trial judge’s finding that an attorney credibly relied on demeanor in exercising a strike, but here, the trial judge simply allowed the challenge without explanation. Since Mr. Brooks was not challenged until the day after he was questioned and thus after dozens of other jurors had been called, the judge might not have recalled his demeanor. Or he may have found such consideration unnecessary, instead basing his ruling on the second proffered reason for the strike. P. 6.

        (2) That reason—Mr. Brooks’ student-teaching obligation—fails even under the highly deferential standard of review applicable here. Mr. Brooks was 1 of more than 50 venire members expressing concern that jury service or sequestration would interfere with work, school, family, or other obligations. Although he was initially concerned about making up lost teaching time, he expressed no further concern once a law clerk reported that the school’s dean would work with Mr. Brooks if he missed time for a trial that week, and the prosecutor did not question him more deeply about the matter. The proffered reason must be evaluated in light of the circumstances that the colloquy and law clerk report took place on Tuesday, the prosecution struck Mr. Brooks on Wednesday, the trial’s guilt phase ended on Thursday, and its penalty phase ended on Friday. The prosecutor’s scenario—that Mr. Brooks would have been inclined to find petitioner guilty of a lesser included offense to obviate the need for a penalty phase—is both highly speculative and unlikely. Mr. Brooks would be in a position to shorten the trial only if most or all of the jurors had favored a lesser verdict. Perhaps most telling, the trial’s brevity, which the prosecutor anticipated on the record during voir dire, meant that jury service would not have seriously interfered with Mr. Brooks’ ability to complete his student teaching. The dean offered to work with him, and the trial occurred relatively early in the fall term, giving Mr. Brooks several weeks to make up the time. The implausibility of the prosecutor’s explanation is reinforced by his acceptance of white jurors who disclosed conflicting obligations that appear to have been at least as serious as Mr. Brooks’. Under Batson’s third stage, the prosecution’s pretextual explanation gives rise to an inference of discriminatory intent. There is no need to decide here whether, in Batson cases, once a discriminatory intent is shown to be a motivating factor, the burden shifts to the prosecution to show that the discriminatory factor was not determinative. It is enough to recognize that a peremptory strike shown to have been motivated in substantial part by discriminatory intent could not be sustained based on any lesser showing by the prosecution. The record here does not show that the prosecution would have pre-emptively challenged Mr. Brooks based on his nervousness alone, and there is no realistic possibility that the subtle question of causation could be profitably explored further on remand more than a decade after petitioner’s trial. Pp. 6–13.

942 So. 2d 484, reversed and remanded.

    Alito, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Scalia, J., joined.

As you can see the top part of the case describes it as the syllabus.  All court cases are broken down into three main sections.  The first is, in a sense, an executive summary of the case as a whole and what the Justices thought about the case.  Then there are two other main sections.  The first is the ruling of the particular court on the case in question along with the names of the Justices that voted in favor of it.  The second part is the dissent(s) of Justices that did not agree with the ruling and their arguments for doing so.  Court cases can make for a very interesting read. 

Some of the arguments I have been looking at still stem from the period Ravi will be covering for his paper on Restoration Philosophy.  It is fascinating to watch Justices try to apply some of the noblest thoughts ever conceived by man to all of the varied situations that arise in the United States.  Especially, because most of the cases are extreme examples that can often prove difficult to apply the noble principles of free exercise of religion to the situations.