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Friend of the Court In this assignment, you and your group have been tasked to choose an important constitutional issue and represent your opinion on it to the Supreme Court itself. You will be doing this through a written //amicus curiae// brief and an annotated webliography. Courts, both state and federal, accept //amicus curiae// briefs when considering important cases. These briefs, meaning “friend of the court”, are written by people who would be affected by the decision of the court, and help inform the judges and justices on the issues surrounding the case, often providing important opinions and information to assist the judges in making their final decisions. Your group will write one of these persuasive arguments, in the hope that you can convince the Supreme Court to issue a ruling you would prefer. Of course, you first need to choose and issue.

=Affirmative Action= =Charter Schools= =Death Penalty= =Drinking Age= =Driving Age= =Flag-burning= =Gun Control= =Mandatory MCAS Testing= =Miranda Rights= =Patriot Act= =Right to Die= =Rights for Illegal Immigrants= =Secret Trials for Terrorists= =Universal Health Insurance= =Voting Age=

The Amicus Brief will be graded according to this rubric. = =

__Wikispace Annotated Webliography__

This assignment calls for groups to create annotated webliographies of websites that support the arguments in their amicus briefs.

You and your group will create a page on Wikispaces.com that will serve as the finished product by which you will be graded.

The page will consist of a title, a brief paragraph description of the issue, the text of the amicus brief and the webliography of at least 10 sites. Each resource needs to contain an annotation, or short description of the information in the resource.

The web resources will need to be hyperlinked to the web pages so they can be accessed with a click.

Here is an example of an annotated webliography on Humanism:

__Searching for Materials__ You will need to use many different tools to locate information for the webliography. When searching the Internet you are required to use search engines other than Google. Ask.com, yahoo.com, vivisimo.com, wisenut.com, dogpile.com and so on must be used to locate information. You will not be allowed to cite Wikipedia or a general encyclopedia (Britannica.com, Encarta, etc.) in your webliography. You must print out and complete a website evaluation form for each website you add to the webliography. Use the information from the evaluation to help write the annotations.

Below is a Checklist of Requirements for the Project