Assignment: Capella University Pregnancy Discrimination and Law Article Summary
Question Description
Supreme Court Chart and Article Summary
1. Pick a Supreme Court Case
a. It must contain an “Opinion of the Court” and at least one “Dissent”
b. You may do cases that have to do with any of the Bill of Rights or the 14th Amendment (free speech, gun rights, search and seizure, rights of the accused, cruel and unusual punishment, cases about race, women, abortion, religion, etc.) You can also do cases about the executive branch (war powers, habeas corpus, treatment of detainees, issues in the military) or the commerce clause as it relates to civil rights.
2. Read the case carefully. Read the opinion of the court and one dissent. Ignore concurrences or additional dissents. Highlight or note the important passages. There may be much in the case that is technical. Don’t worry about that stuff. Be on the look out for the big statements, especially those that show how the Court is interpreting the part of the Constitution in question. Notice the kind of quotes I picked in the examples I gave you.
3. Chart
a. In an excel document, input the Case information
i. Case name
ii. Case ID (e.g. 347 US 483)
iii. One-paragraph summary of the Facts of the case (in your own words)
iiii. Constitutional Question (you can get from the opinion or websites like www.oyez.com, www.findlaw.com)
v. One paragraph summary in your own words of the holding. Include the vote count, 9-0, 8-1, 7-2, 6-3, 5-4 and a basic summary of the Court’s answer to the constitutional question.
b. Then your document should have three columns – one for the subject matter or issue, one for the Opinion of the Court and one for any one of the dissents. For this assignment, cut and paste only the most important quotations from the case as has been done in the example I have given. The key is to be able to match up points made in the dissent with points made in the Court’s opinion. It is this upon which you will be graded. You should have at least 10 quotations for the Opinion of the Court and 10 quotations for the dissenters. Again, only include the most decisive quotations. The quotations should not be any longer than three sentences. Do not concern yourself with earlier Supreme Court decisions, or issues in the lower court decisions, just focus on quotes in the decision that analyze the constitution or make big statements about rights and justice.
c. Note that some cases are quite long. But once you find a good one, they are worth reading. Take your time to find the right case before you begin. Find a case about a subject in which you have some interest. If you find gun cases interesting, find a supreme court about gun rights. If you are interested in the abortion debate, find an abortion case. Older cases (pre-1975) tend to be shorter.
d. For the chart portion of the assignment, I have given you examples from Court cases that I have done. My examples are beyond what I expect from you, but it will give you a sense for what I am looking.
4. Read one high quality journal article about your case or the issue in your case (e.g. privacy, abortion, capital punishment). This article should be from law reviews or academic journals, etc.. The article must be at least 10 pages in length. On a separate page of the assignment (in a word document) summarize thearticle in two paragraphs in your own words. It should be well-written and be a clear presentation of the main argument of the author and his understanding of the case. Upload the article itself to Blackboard in the form of a PDF or a doc so I can read the article. Do not just include a link. You may not use material published as blogs or entries on websites. It must be a published article in a law review or a journal. For this part, you may use Lexis Nexus or JSTOR or any other academic search engine in the library’s electronic resources. You may also use an approved article sentto me by email ahead of time. If you have any doubt about whether your article is a good one, email me.
Read Also:
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
The shortage of nurses is not a new issue; the predicted nursing shortage has been prominent in the media for most of nursing’s history and more recently in the past several years (Masters, 2017). I remember when I first started as a manager at my job in 2019 where I get pulled to the floor because of last minute call-ins or no call-no show for staff. It happened no more than once a month for managers to fill in the gap; however, when the COVID19 pandemic hit has increased the frequency significantly. Even before the COVID19 pandemic, nurses felt undervalued and assailed by dysfunctional systems, ineffective policies, and substandard, sometimes, unsafe work environments (Grant, 2022). The pandemic has only intensified those concerns leaving nurses nationwide worn down, stressed out, and fed up. It was projected that about 500,000 nurses are needed to fill the shortage in the United States until 2025 (Masters, 2017).
These projections are based on the trends that include increase in population, a larger proportion of elderly persons, increase in technology, and advances in medical sciences. These were already preexisting before the height of Covid19 pandemic. The extreme shortage we are now experiencing could be brought upon by these combined reasons. When COVID19 started, we were faced by an enemy we have no knowledge about, and it affected the world. The healthcare workforce was exhausted and got infected as well, of which some we lost along the way. These brought scare to fellow healthcare workers and chose to quit their jobs making it hard for facilities and shaken by the increased staffing shortage. Research shows that optimized nurse staffing is integral to high-level patient care and better patient and family experience (Grant, 2022). Healthcare facilities had to provide care to their patients and so they mostly relied on agency staffing to get by.
LopesWrite Policy
For assignments that need to be submitted to LopesWrite, please be sure you have received your report and Similarity Index (SI) percentage BEFORE you do a “final submit” to me.
Once you have received your report, please review it. This report will show you grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors that can easily be fixed. Take the extra few minutes to review instead of getting counted off for these mistakes.
Review your similarities. Did you forget to cite something? Did you not paraphrase well enough? Is your paper made up of someone else’s thoughts more than your own?
Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for tips on improving your paper and SI score.
Late Policy
The university’s policy on late assignments is 10% penalty PER DAY LATE. This also applies to late DQ replies.
Please communicate with me if you anticipate having to submit an assignment late. I am happy to be flexible, with advance notice. We may be able to work out an extension based on extenuating circumstances.
If you do not communicate with me before submitting an assignment late, the GCU late policy will be in effect.
I do not accept assignments that are two or more weeks late unless we have worked out an extension.
As per policy, no assignments are accepted after the last day of class. Any assignment submitted after midnight on the last day of class will not be accepted for grading.
Communication
Communication is so very important. There are multiple ways to communicate with me:
Questions to Instructor Forum: This is a great place to ask course content or assignment questions. If you have a question, there is a good chance one of your peers does as well. This is a public forum for the class.
Individual Forum: This is a private forum to ask me questions or send me messages. This will be checked at least once every 24 hours.
