TO AMERICAN GOVERNMENT
Homework Assignment # 1
Civil Rights, Identity and the Supreme Court
Length: 2-4 pages
As we’ll discuss in class, the language of civil rights (and civil
liberties as well) is the language of the law.
That is to say, it is often up to the courts to interpret what the
various civil rights espoused in the constitution actually mean in practice,
and nowhere have such interpretations been more vital than at the Supreme Court,
which has been responsible for expanding (and at times contracting) the rights
of people belonging to various identities.
For example, each of the following cases has been critical in addressing
a key right (or set of rights) for a particular identity (i.e.
African-Americans, women, GLBT community).
However, each of these cases has also had an indirect impact on identities
that are not directly part of the case, as well as upon society as a whole.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
United Auto Workers v. Johnson Controls (1991)
United States v. Virginia (1996)
Shelby County v. Holder (2013)
Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)
Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil
Rights Commission (2018)
Your task is to research one of these rulings and respond to the following questions:
- Briefly
describe the background of the case
- What is the key issue at stake?
- What arguments were put forth by each side of the case?
- How did the Supreme Court rule?
- Which side won?
- What was the underlying constitutional argument?
- Were there any notable statements in the dissenting or concurring opinions?
- Describe the impact (or potential impact) of
this case
- How
might people who associate themselves with different social groups and embrace
identities (e.g. racial, gender, sexual) have been affected by this case?
- Try to assess both the direct effects (on members of those identities themselves), as well as indirect (other identities).
- How
might society as a whole been affected by this case?
- Be sure to give an example.
- To what degree has there been a backlash to this court ruling?
- To
what extent might this case affect you, or at least someone you know?
- Think about individual experiences with issues of race, gender or sexual identity, whether involving yourself or someone you know.
- How
might people who associate themselves with different social groups and embrace
identities (e.g. racial, gender, sexual) have been affected by this case?
The D2L website has a sign-up forum for these cases. Students should sign up under the appropriate thread, with no more than five students per case. Any student who has not signed up by 7 PM on Friday, January 31 will be assigned a case based on availability.
Additional comments
- All homework is due by the beginning of class on the assigned due date. Papers turned in late will be penalized as outlined in the syllabus.
- Assignments are to be turned in via an attachment to the dropbox section of the D2L website. If you are having problems turning in the assignment via the website, the time to address those problems is before or when it is due. If you are unable to upload the assignment and you want to demonstrate that you completed it on time, then you can email the assignment in before the due date, or you can bring in a hard copy. However, you will still need to get me an electronic copy in one fashion or another if you wish the assignment to be graded.
- Because I will be grading and making comments directly on the assignment itself, I would prefer that students utilize MS Word for the assignments, although I will accept pdf files.
- I do not want to see papers that heavily rely upon bullet points. The organization should come from the natural flow of your writing, which includes the appropriate transitions and possibly even headers between sections where appropriate. Your paper should also have an introduction and a conclusion.
- Be certain to do a thorough job of proofreading, as it is easy to make grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors. To assist students, I have provided links to two different websites that provide some discussion of notable and common mistakes in writing. Either of these sites can serve as a handy reference tool if you are uncertain as to the rules and conventions of writing.
- Assignments are to be double-spaced, with no more than one-inch margins. Please make sure that your paper fulfills the minimum page requirement and that the pages are numbered. Papers should include a title page and a separate works-cited page, neither of which count towards the minimum length.
- If you wish, I can look at drafts of this (or any) assignment, but please make certain to email the draft to me sufficiently early so that any feedback will indeed be useful (no less than three days before the assignment due-date).
A few words on plagiarism and source citation
The GGC Library website states: “Plagiarism is the presentation of someone else’s words or ideas, intentionally or unintentionally, in a way that makes them appear to be one’s own.” Always make sure that you cite your sources, as the D2L website is connected to a plagiarism-checker website called Turnitin.com. You will be able to see the originality report generated by this website as well, so make certain that no more than a relatively small proportion of the paper is taken verbatim from other sources.
Although directly quoting from other sources without proper citations constitutes the most blatant form of plagiarism, it is not the only form. For example, it can also include those assignment passages that are almost verbatim, but with relatively minor changes to get around plagiarism detection software. Furthermore, plagiarism also can include the use of graphs, statistics, theories and concepts from other sources without proper attribution. If you are uncertain as to what constitutes plagiarism, please consult the appropriate document posted under “Course Resources.”
Plagiarism cases will be referred to the Office of Student Integrity here at GGC, with potential consequences ranging from a written reprimand to a “do-over” for the paper, to a zero on the paper, with the potential for even greater consequences depending on the circumstances, especially for multiple violations.
You can use either the APA (American Psychological Association) or the MLA (Modern Language Association) style of citing your sources. Both styles require parenthetical citations in the text of the paper, and as a list of sources at the end of each case brief. Additional details, as well as examples of either citation style can be found in a link to the GGC library website, which is posted on the course website. Please follow either citation style and do not use footnotes or endnotes for your citations.
Finally, I would like this assignment to be the product of your work. Thus, you can (and should) use quotations to help support your arguments, but they should not become a crutch, and serve as a substitute for your own analysis. I will downgrade papers that rely too heavily upon direct quotes, regardless of whether those quotes are cited or uncited.
Citing Supreme Court Cases.
Make sure to use the proper format for citing Supreme Court cases, using citation as the header for each case brief:
- Name of the case (underlined or italicized);
- Volume of the United States Reports;
- Reporter abbreviation (“U.S.”);
- First page where the case can be found in the reporter;
- Year the case was decided (within parentheses).
For example, if you were to cite the noted civil rights case: Plessy v. Ferguson, the citation would
look like this: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
EVALUATION: HOMEWORK # 1
STUDENT:
| AREA | REQUIREMENTS | POINT VALUE | YOU EARNED |
| DESCRIPTION Background | Provides sufficient description of the background, including the key issue (or issues) at stake in the case. | 25 | |
| DESCRIPTION SCOTUS Ruling | Provides sufficient description of the ruling by the Supreme Court on the case at hand | 25 | |
| DISCUSSION | Provides a discussion of the impact of this case, which addresses personal experience, as well as society as a whole. | 30 | |
| SPELLING/GRAMMAR | Relatively free of spelling or grammatical errors. Avoids wordy, awkward, or overly casual language | 10 | |
| MISC | Meets minimum page length and is in standard college format, including separate title page. Includes proper citations. | 10 | |
| TOTAL | 100 |
Comments:
