With this term's opinions having just been published, I remembered a paper I wrote for one of my classes at USF. It was a Constitutional Law class on the First Amendment, and one of our assignments was to hold a mock Supreme Court case, impersonating either the lawyers for each of the two sides or one of the Justices.
The case was
United States Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, which, in short, dealt with whether the government can restrict the free speech of associations as a condition for receiving public funding. To my delight I was assigned Anthony Kennedy and, fittingly enough, I ended up being the swing voter, in upholding the statute 4-3 (we only had 7 students to impersonate Justices). As it turns out, I was completely wrong, as the statute was struck down 6-2 (the dissenters being Scalia and Thomas, no less
).
Still, I'd really be curious to see what our resident legal experts think of my reasoning. I certainly didn't "get" Kennedy's judicial philosophy right, but does my reasoning make sense in and of itself? What are the issues I might have missed?
So let me know if anyone is interested, and I'll post it here.
