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American Constitutional Law
Excerpted Supreme Court cases for LSU Online's POLI 4020: American Constitutional Law course.
I have edited the cases so that they are rarely longer than twenty pages in length. As the semester progresses, you will learn to read cases more quicky, partly because the more recent cases, though often longer in the original, are written in simpler English, partly because you will learn to hunt for the ratio decidendi--the reason for the decision--and to race through obiter dicta. I often did not edit out the footnotes, in case you want to chase down the references, but I will not be testing you on them and you can safely pass over them in reading these cases. JRS
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