On October 3, the satirical news organization The Onion filed a delightfully irreverent amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the petitioner seeking cert in Novak v. City of Parma, Ohio, et al. Even if you have no interest in the case, the brief is a good time—a deftly written panegyric to the art and relevance of ...

On October 7, the Supreme Court finally heard oral arguments in the decade-long copyright software slugfest Google v. Oracle. Thomas Goldstein represented Google, Joshua Rosenkranz represented Oracle, and Deputy Solicitor General Malcom Stewart represented the United States as amicus curiae in support of Oracle. The major arguments discussed were the following:  whether the Java declaring code Google copied into the ...

I was on the fence with regard to commenting on Georgia v. Public Resource. Its details are arcane, rather dull, and, despite rising to the level of a Supreme Court decision, is generally inapplicable to copyright law. In essence, the Court succeeded in commenting on a matter of contract law because the upshot of this will be that States seeking to ...

Because I opened my big maw in December when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, I feel compelled to follow up now that the Court has ruled. In a 7-2 decision, SCOTUS held that the Colorado Commission failed to meet the standard of “neutrality” when considering baker, Jack Phillips’s appeal to his ...

It’s another Independence Day weekend, and I can’t help but notice that we find ourselves this year grappling with some unfortunate consequences of liberty run amok.  We’ve got open-carry nuts sporting assault rifles in department stores and coffee shops to prove how free they are; and we’ve got the supreme court granting business owners the right to discriminate against employees ...

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