According to Clarence Thomas, this Brandeis professor and visiting scholar at Wellesley was a mediocre employee who only had a job because he had given it to her.

PZ Myers, biologist and blogger at Pharyngula, was recently sued for referring to the “flagrant crackpottery” in a book he was reviewing. (Considering that the book in question had a drawing of a spider with 10 legs, I can’t disagree.) The author sued for $15 million. Less than a month later, he withdrew the suit. (Gee, wonder why…)

Update: in a followup to his original review, Myers called the book “a history of the evolution of balloon animals”. That prompted this LOL”Cat” :-)

When Perfect 10 sued Google, among their claims was that providing HTML that displayed the images from their server was infringement, and that all the people who viewed these images were infringing because their browsers made copies to display them.

Thankfully, they got slapped down nicely.

The Fully Informed Jury Association wants to make sure that all American jurors understand their rights and duties.

At the time the Constitution was written, the definition of the term “jury” referred to a group of citizens empowered to judge both the law and the evidence in the case before it. Then, in the February term of 1794, the Supreme Court conducted a jury trial in the case of the State of Georgia vs. Brailsford (3 Dall 1). The instructions to the jury in the first jury trial before the Supreme Court of the United States illustrate the true power of the jury. Chief Justice John Jay said: “It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision.” (emphasis added) “…you have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy”.

So you see, in an American courtroom there are in a sense twelve judges in attendance, not just one. And they are there with the power to review the “law” as well as the “facts”! Actually, the “judge” is there to conduct the proceedings in an orderly fashion and maintain the safety of all parties involved.

As recently as 1972, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that the jury has an ” unreviewable and irreversible power… to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge…. (US vs Dougherty, 473 F 2d 1113, 1139 (1972))

I had forgotten about Oyez.org, a website that posts recordings of oral arguments before the Supreme Court. Check it out when you get a chance.

The New York Times today ran an editorial defining activist Supreme Court justices to be those who most often voted to strike down Congressional action. Care to take a guess on how the voting went before you read it?

Thanks, SeattleSusieQ.

Me: “I can’t believe Bush is getting to make two Supreme Court nominations. There’s just no justice.”

Co-worker: *rimshot*

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Grokster could be held liable for infringement. However, it wasn’t because they created a file-sharing technology: it’s because they marketed it to illegally share copyrighted material. As Doug Lichtman, who argued for MGM, put it:

That is not the standard I was hoping for. As I wrote in the amicus brief, I would have allowed liability to be based exclusively on objective evidence, for example a party’s failure to alter its technology in a way that would significantly reduce infringing behavior without significantly interfering with legitimate.

The Court closed the door on this sort of inquiry, however. As the opinion makes clear, evidence of unreasonable product design can be considered only if there is also smoking-gun evidence of intent. Indeed, even outlandish design desicions are off limits without the relevant precursor.

The DoJ apparently thinks that the following quotation is a threat to national security.

“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”

Update: I forgot to mention the source of the above quote. It’s a US Supreme Court decision.

Anybody But Bush in ’04. Please. I’m begging you.

In 1948, the Air Force refused to release documents relating to the crash of a bomber in Florida to a court where the widows were suing for damages, claiming “national security interests”. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled that national security was a valid reason for withholding information from courts.

50 years later, the documents were declassified, and it was revealed that they contained no secrets short of the incompetence of everyone from the base commander on down. The widows are trying to get the Supreme Court to revisit the decision, since they had fraud perpetrated on them. NPR ran the story tonight on All Things Considered.

Is this the government we want suspending habeas corpus and deciding that you have given up your citizenship through actions you have taken, rather than an explicit renounciation of citizenship?