Having looked at two panels worth, some thoughts:
• I appreciate the creativity in the papers. Most of you are doing more than summarizing your notes from class discussions, including original research and some creative ideas. Keep it coming. That said, your creative ideas have to make sense and have to hold together as a constitutional, policy, and practical matter.
• Reveiw the Good Writing and Talking Procedure post and the Assessments sheet; many papers ignore what I want and do not want to see in the papers. In particular, too much first-person--half your paper should not be taken up with your thought process in writing the paper; get to your argument.
• The analysis remains too cursory. You cannot make an important point--such as the constitutional validity of something like term limits--in a sentence of paragraph. Again, if that means narrowing the scope of your paper to dig deeper, great.
• Be careful about getting into topics or issues that we have not covered in class or that we will cover later in the class. For example, several people wrote about a SCOTUS code of ethics. That did not come up in our discussions or reading, which were focused on structure and jurisdiction. The answer rests on a complex interaction of broad terms such as "necessary and proper" and "judicial power." We will get into it later in the semester. But nothing that we covered to this point allowed you fully analyze that question.
