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Actually, in Amurrika, we can now also infer guilt from your uncomfortable silence (see Salinas v. Texas).

Hooray for progress!

Yes, but I'm thinking more of USPTO process in this case. The patent can still be granted unless someone files a petition citing prior art. After that it may be invalidated based on Bitcoin existing, but my point it that it's still possible that the bank can receive this patent.

Except that it is almost exactly unlike bitcoin. Because it deals in real bank account and real money. Money you can spend anywhere.

The novel part is the fees-free micropayments, which will allow you to use things on the web without being flooded with ads for things
you don't want. Payments as low as factional pennies. Its a frangible currency.

However, SCOTUS is currently reviewing this whole field of "do something via computer" and get a patent, and the whole business practices thing is as likely to be tossed out or more tightly limited in the aftermath.
Coin is coin. And doing it by computer is not that new. Micro-payments are not that new. They were simply too expensive to deal with in the past.

According to the Supreme Court in "Citizen's United v. Federal Election Commission", corporations ARE people.

http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission/

According to SCOTUSblog's most recent StatPack, the court has decided 28/48 (58%) of cases unanimously so far this term. Scalia has been agreeing in full with Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan 65%, 50%, and 62% of the time, respectively. If you consider agreeing in full, part, or in judgement only then the agreement rises to 77%, 71%, and 74%.

Digging through the Supreme Court Database, this happened exactly once before (Scalia, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Ginsberg all agreeing in dissent). It happened in Williams v. Illinois, which was interestingly also a DNA testing case. The question at the time was "Whether a state rule of evidence allowing an expert witness to testify about the results of DNA testing performed by non-testifying analysts, where the defendant has no opportunity to confront the actual analysts, violates the Confrontation Clause." The majority held that it did not violate the confrontation clause, with these four justices in dissent.

The linked Marketwatch article is complete BS. Clearly the author had no idea what they were talking about, and just took one sentence and expanded it into massive hyperbole. Here are some choice examples from the article:

Put simply, though Apple Inc. AAPL -0.15% has the copyright on the iPhone

I don't think so. They have patents, not copyrights.

It could be your personal electronic devices or the family jewels that have been passed down from your great-grandparents who immigrated from Spain.

No, those things also cannot be copyrighted.

It could also become a weighty issue for auto trade-ins and resales, considering about 40% of most U.S.-made cars carry technology and parts that were made overseas.

Also nothing to do with copyright.

He himself once bought an antique desk from a Supreme Court justice.

Yet another example.

It sounds like the author just made stuff up as they went along. Here are some better articles:
SCOTUS! eBay! Cert and Other Sundries
Summary of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. at the Supreme Court's own blog

The guy who's being brought to trial seems to have imported enough textbooks to earn $1.2 million. That means this isn't really a case about reselling your car, but about whether private citizens can buy a bunch of stuff abroad and re-sell it here for profit because it's cheaper abroad.

You can track the legislation here:

• SCOTUSblog: Kirtsaeng v. Wiley and Sons

Elena Kagan was Solicitor General in 2009 when, according to Truthout.org, "the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the previous ruling and placed a nationwide ban on Monsanto's Roundup Ready alfalfa." Again from Truthout.org, "In March 2010, a month before the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case, the solicitor general's office released a legal brief despite the fact that the US government was not a defendant in the case." This brief argued that "The judgment of the court of appeals should be reversed, and the case should be remanded with instructions to vacate the permanent injunction entered by the district court." However, as far as I can determine, Kagan never worked for Monsanto.

Its also worth noting that the Truthout.org claim that the Solicitor General "released a legal brief despite the fact that the US government was not a defendant in the case" is a bald-faced lie. The US government was the original defendant in the case at the trial level, which was a challenge that various government entities, particularly the US Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, had violated the federal law in the process of approving Round-Up Ready Alfalfa without an Environmental Impact Statement. Monsanto was not an original party to the case at trial level, but was an intervenor at trial after the decision and in the remedy phase. The U.S. briefs at the Supreme Court were not non-party amicus briefs, they were briefs "for federal respondents". Documents relating to the case are available at SCOTUSblog.

SCOTUSblog

3. Unauthorized resale: Authentic goods being sold in some manner that makes the manufacturer a sad, sad, panda.
. . .
[T]hey will also bust you for importing authentic Rolexes, legally purchased outside the US, if the trademark holder doesn't want you selling them in the US, despite them being 100% genuine product, with no theft or fraud in the distribution chain

The Supreme Court will decide this issue next term in the context of a student importing legally purchased textbooks in Thailand and reselling them in the US. http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kirtsaeng-v-john-wiley-sons-inc/

Plain English Holding: Under the Federal Arbitration Act, California must enforce arbitration agreements even if the agreement requires that consumer complaints be arbitrated individually (instead of on a class-action basis).

from here.

"I understand that it is illegal..."

I'd like to understand why you think it is illegal. According to the fine article, this was a legally produced book, legally purchased abroad, brought back to the US, and then sold. By default, you'd think the first sale doctrine would apply and therefore the subsequent sale is also legal. As it turns out though, there's disagreement on application of first sale in the Circuit Courts and hence the trip to the USSC. More details are available here:

Lyle Denniston @ SCOTUSblog

Here's the key bit:

"There is now a three-way split among the Circuit Courts: the Second Circuit declaring that foreign-made works can never be resold in the U.S. without the copyright owner’s consent, the Ninth Circuit ruling that such a foreign-made product sometimes can be sold in the U.S. without permission, but only after the owner has approved an earlier sale inside the U.S., and the Third Circuit deciding that such a product can always be re-sold without permission, so long as the copyright owner had authorized the first sale that occurred overseas."

Given the recent SCOTUS decision about the patentability of "laws of nature" (Mayo v Prometheus)...

I've long said that when condiments start suing mythological figures over whether the laws of nature are imaginary property, we can officially say that things have gotten out of hand. Everyone thought I was joking, but apparently, we have reached that point.

Sorry to rain on your parade, but as usual, news reporting of SCOTUS decisions is invariably completely wrong; as they try to create an exciting narrative they end up completely messing up the often crutial details.

In this case, the court did not rule that you need a warrant to track people with GPS. All they ruled is that doing such constitutes a serach for the purposes of the fourth ammendment.

The ruling explicitly leaves open the questions of whether or not performing this search without a warrant is a reasonable or unreasonable search, and if unreasonable what the remedy is (so we don't know if the exclusionary principle applies to any evidence gained or not).

Much better analysis of the ruling and how its not the huge victory everyone is portraying:

http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/01/reactions-to-jones-v-united-states-the-government-fared-much-better-than-everyone-realizes/

http://www.scotusblog.com/2011/12/argument-recap-for-want-of-a-good-hypothetical/ ...Over and over, the Court puzzled over how one could start with a law of nature, which is not eligible for a patent, and then find a way to expand on it that is creative enough to earn a patent. It is an inquiry, one of the Justices said early on, that might lend itself to the conjuring of “millions of hypotheticals.” But the hypotheticals that were forthcoming were not very helpful.

It's funny that you ask this, because the Supreme Court just heard a case on precisely this topic. Read the ScotusBlog analysis on what the Justices argued below:
http://www.scotusblog.com/2011/11/argument-recap-for-gps-get-a-warrant/

http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/att-mobility-v-concepcion/

Also, a recent post on SCOTUSblog has a nice analysis of why the AT&T decision wasn't necessarily as dire for consumers as most commentators have stated: http://www.scotusblog.com/2011/09/att-mobility-faa-preemption-and-class-arbitration/

http://www.scotusblog.com/2011/09/the-new-dawn-of-nonclass-aggregation/ discusses class actions in light of the Walmart vs Dukes Supreme Court decision of the last term. If I am reading it correctly (IANAL) the author suggests that class action will be essentially impossible under a series of court and legislative decisions taken in the last two decades. Perhaps Google should ask to have the Authors Guild decertified.

The new dawn of nonclass aggregation

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, of the University of Georgia School of Law, examines the difficulties of class certification after Wal-Mart and Concepcion and concludes that the decisions may ultimately pose broader questions about procedural justice and institutional legitimacy.

The opinion quoted Ginsberg v. New York because it's prior precedent, and did not overturn Ginsberg because it was an inappropriate case to do so. An appropriate case to overturn Ginsberg would be one that dealt with sexual material (not violent material), and expanding this case to cover sexual material would have been judicial activism in the technical sense of the word.

Thanks to the wonderful SCOTUSblog you can read the opinion below, petition for cert, brief in opposition, petitioners reply, and the amicus briefs.

Which ones has he ended? Oh yea, Iraq is over -- I forgot. Obama officially declared the end of hostilities or something stupid like that some time ago -- a bit like Bush with the "Mission Accomplished" thingy. If you think Obama is anything other than an extension of Bush's policies, you're not paying attention.

Obama asserts the right to execute American citizens without any kind of trial, charges, or judicial oversight based on nothing but allegations, i.e., Obama says your are a terrorist -- you get murdered and don't get a chance to defend yourself. Look up Amendments 4-6 to the constitution to see just how breathtaking this is. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/02/assassinations/index.html

Then of course there is the refusal to prosecute the illegal wiretapping of the previous administration, but rather to immunize the evildoers: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/01/obama-sides-wit/

Closing Gitmo? Not. But worse, since the procedures at Gitmo have been declared unconstitutional, Obama is merely shifting operations to Bagram, as if the place in which one denies Habeas Corpus is of such great import: http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/05/no-habeas-at-bagram/

Obama uses the state secrets doctrine to prevent civil lawsuits against American companies complicit in the plaintiffs' torture under Bush's rendition program: http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/09/suit_alleging_cia_torture_dism.html

Moral: If you hated Bush, you need to be hating Obama because he and Bush are brothers.

I'll tell you the same thing I told the above respondant:

"in U.S. v. Knotts in 1983, it ruled that police use of an electronic beeper to track a suspect’s trip to a drug lab was not a search."

http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/11/police-and-high-tech-monitoring/

Where the court is silent, and the law is quiet, it is legal. The Supreme Court let's lower court rulings stand all the time, refusing to even hear cases. The law doesn't wait on SCOTUS rulings to become legal. You can not like it all you want. I don't like it. But the reality is, until a court says it is illegal, it is legal.

"in U.S. v. Knotts in 1983, it ruled that police use of an electronic beeper to track a suspect’s trip to a drug lab was not a search."

http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/11/police-and-high-tech-monitoring/

Where the court is silent, and the law is quiet, it is legal. The Supreme Court let's lower court rulings stand all the time, refusing to even hear cases. The law doesn't wait on SCOTUS rulings to become legal. You can not like it all you want. I don't like it. But the reality is, until a court says it is illegal, it is legal.

Law is not a "Do as I say, not as I do" type thing.

When it's written by corporations, enacted by buffoons and sociopaths elected by those same corporations, enforced by hired thugs in both flak jackets and suits, and interpereted by judges who are bought, paid for, and traded like so many Goddamn stocks, yeah, it pretty much is. Just a question of how much it'll cost. Somehow, people seem to be okay with this. Some even consider it normal. I don't get it.

First sale doctrine says they can do whatever they want with the DVDs once they buy them...

Unless the DVDs are manufactured and sold in another country (see Costco v. Omega) Netflix needs to get very cleaver politically and legally or they are going to get marginalized over the next 5 or so years.

While I initially dismissed the summary as FUD, given that TFA refers purely to the practices of resellers like Costco, the core issue from the SCOTUS blog is more fundamental.

Plain English Issue: Under the first-sale doctrine of copyright law, someone who purchases a copyrighted work (like a book) can later sell the work to someone else without the permission of the copyright holder (e.g., the book’s author). Does the “first-sale doctrine” apply to imported works manufactured abroad? (Kagan, J., recused).

Aside from books, which are often printed in Canada, I buy a lot of second hand and yes imported video games, normally made in Asia by foreign companies.
If Nintendo and Sony wanted to end the used sales market, they just got given a big gun. Microsoft however seems out of luck by virtue of making goods for a local market? The 9th circuit ruling is based on Omega being a Swiss company, even though it has authorized resellers (of which Costco isn't) in the states. If they are suggesting (as TFA notes) that purely foreign *manufactured* goods are exempt, this flies in the face of existing international conventions of copyright (something I am writing a paper on right now) which say that copyright conventions are enforced locally by all member nations. First sale notwithstanding, Swiss goods have long been subject to US copyright law within the US. The overhead for enforcing international laws locally would crush an already collapsing legal system. Tariffs and duty exist to deter the fact that goods are being imported/exported to other markets by third parties.

Realistically I think this may be a decision with no teeth, once watchdogs start pointing out that every family member of every US lawmaker continues to buy things off eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, and second hand stores. These retail vectors of course will claim no responsibility for what is sold via their systems. These same laws are hurting capitalism at the expense of corporatism, which then hurts the corporations because people can no longer engage in capitalism to help buy more of their goods. Vicious.

Why? Partly because she was the Solicitor General:

SHAPIRO: How common is it for a new justice to have to recuse from the number of cases that Kagan is recusing herself from?

TOTENBERG: Well, it's not common because, at least more recently, we haven't had top Justice Department officials migrating to the court. But it's happened many times in our history. Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was solicitor general, for example, recused himself from about half the cases the court heard in his first year. But that high number was largely because he remained SG until he was confirmed.

And Kagan didn't do that. She stopped being SG right after her nomination. So, this high number of recusals, I think, is front loaded. She'll probably be recused from about a third of the docket this year, and then next year her recusals will plummet to zero or something close to that.

One interesting thing, Ari, is that there are a number of cases that she's reused herself from that she really had nothing to do with. And these are cases that generally involve commercial disputes. And the Justice Department filed a notice that it was taking no position, and these are just routine evaluations. They're done by lower-level lawyers but she signed the filing, so she's taking herself out of those cases.

SHAPIRO: And when she's recused and there are eight justices on the Supreme Court, what happens then?

TOTENBERG: Well, the case goes forward, as usual. And if there's a four-to-four tie, the lower court opinion is automatically affirmed without the Supreme Court issued any opinion, then presumably the issue can come up in another case, later, where Kagan can participate.

First, no court has yet ruled whether the watches are covered by the Copyright Act simply because of the log on them. See the government's amicus brief urging the petition being denied at pp. 20-21 (25-26 in the PDF). Costco's misuse-of-copyright defense has yet to be evaluated - the court may ultimately rule that logos do not place an imported product under the umbrella of the copyright act.

Second, the Ninth Circuit decision specifically calls out several specific factors of this case, including that the firm in question clearly did not set up shop outside the U.S. to gain the protection of the bar on import present in Section 602 of the Copyright Act. The scary hypotheticals people are raising have not been ruled on.

I'd be interested to hear what people think the import ban actually protects against if the first sale doctrine applies to sales outside the U.S. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any protection the ban on imports adds iif it is not a carve-out from the first sale doctrine. Illegally copied works are already covered by other provisions of the act. Infringing in two ways (import and distribution) doesn't increase the damages a plaintiff could protect. On a first blush analysis, a contrary decision seems to render the Section 602 import ban meaningless - something courts are loathe to do when interpreting law. Again, though, I haven't done more than a superficial analysis on this point.

None of this is to say the policy outcome is good, or even that the court made the right decision. I just want to clarify that the decision is not nearly as bad as the summary makes it sound, even without taking into account the fact that this is non-binding precedent except in the Ninth Circuit.

Relatedly, Harper v. Maverick Recording Co. (Docket number 10-94), an RIAA case which concerns the innocent infringer defense, was denied cert at the same conference.

Relatedly, Harper v. Maverick Recording Co. (Docket number 10-94), an RIAA case which concerns the innocent infringer defense, was denied cert at the same conference.

Tyranny? Don't go pretending that Democrats aren't tyrants.

Obama asserts the right to execute American citizens without any kind of trial, charges, or judicial oversight based on nothing but allegations, i.e., Obama says your are a terrorist -- you get murdered and don't get a chance to defend yourself. Look up Amendments 4-6.

Read: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/02/assassinations/index.html
Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JojnYXRrBaI

Don't ask don't tell: Obama fulfilled his duty to defend the law in court and lost. He could have left it there, but chose to appeal. You can't blame that on obstructionist republicans because you just don't accidentally file an appeal and republicans can neither further nor hinder the decision to appeal. http://jonathanturley.org/2010/10/20/obama-administration-loses-effort-to-block-injunction-of-dont-ask-dont-tell-announces-appeal-to-reverse-victory-over-dadt/

Then of course there is the refusal to prosecute the illegal wiretapping of the previous administration, but rather to immunize the evildoers: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/01/obama-sides-wit/

Closing Gitmo? Not. But worse, since the procedures at Gitmo have been declared unconstitutional, Obama is merely shifting operations to Bagram, as if the place in which one denies Habeas Corpus is of such great import: http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/05/no-habeas-at-bagram/

Obama uses the state secrets doctrine to prevent civil lawsuits against American companies complicit in the plaintiffs' torture under Bush's rendition program: http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/09/suit_alleging_cia_torture_dism.html

Did you read the actual argument, or just Fox New's blatant lying about it? The Solicitor General's arguments were, essentially:

1) The claim being made by the appellant is too broad
2) The court is bound by a century of precedent allowing the government to regulate corporations attempting to buy elections
3) The government cannot prevent individuals from campaign spending, as such would violate the First Amendment. "That is not the case with corporate spending, which does not reflect the
personal views of the officers (who cannot appropriately spend corporate money for purposes of personal selfexpression), the customers or shareholders (whose political preferences officers do not and generally cannot ascertain), or the corporation itself (which is an artificial
entity that has no “beliefs” to express). Thus, while restrictions on the use of treasury funds for electioneering may prevent corporate officers from utilizing one effective means to further the corporations’ economic interests, those restrictions do not hinder the expression of
any natural person’s ideas."

Nothing about "We can ban books" at all.

(Full coverage of Citizen's United on SCOTUSblog

Complete crap statistics. If it were true, it would mean that the USOC took at least 50 appeals for decisions from the 9th circuit, and overturned at least 47 of them in one year. Considering that they only granted review for 80 cases in the last term, that's basically an impossibility. And it actually is. According to this, the 9th circuit was overturned 71% of the time, which is actually less often than the other two next busiest courts of appeal.

Did you make up these statistics on your own, or did you just regurgitate what you heard?

You might be interested in some speculation about the likely outcome of Bilski. It sounds like there's a good chance that Stevens is writing the opinion and that State Street will be overturned.

SCOTUSBlog posted a nice, hysteria-free overview of Kagan's career a few days ago. It's well worth a read, and the authors seem to know a thing or two about the courts (unlike most reporters and pundits who have been covering the story).

If you read up on her career, you'll see that she has a great deal of respect for existing precedent, and doesn't seem to have allowed her own personal opinions to interfere with her past jobs.

SCOTUSblog has a great writeup on Kagan.

Although they ultimately come out in her favor, the writers make a great presentation of their evidence, and certainly know a thing or two about the Supreme Court.

It's definitely worth a read before sounding off on your initial gut reactions to the nomination. It's also your right and prerogative to research the case against Kagan, although you really need to comprehend and understand the context of her job as Solicitor General before jumping to any conclusions.

Personally, despite my initial unease, I'm growing to like her, and would welcome a persuasive, non-activist judge on the court.

I, too, carried your misunderstanding of the term "militia". At the time of the writing of the constitution, the militia was, in fact, all able-bodied men.

It's too easy to rely on self-affirming, second-rate opinions about the second amendment instead of taking the time to read a first-rate scholarly work such as an actual Supreme Court opinion. Scalia's opinion for the majority upholding second amendment rights (and striking down D.C.'s attempt at a total gun ban) is beautifully informative about the second amendment right, its purpose and importance. It is also quite readable. My understanding of the second amendment changed dramatically after reading it.

Or, you could continue to swallow arguments that, rather than inform, simply reinforce your status quo.

(P.S. In case you are scared of the opinion, be aware that it ends with Scalia pointedly affirming the reasonableness of the State implementing gun control regulations.)

Rantings, indeed.

To wit:

Are you aware of Sotomayor's dissent in which she defended the 1st amendment rights of a white NYPD employee when he was fired for having sent blatantly racist and anti-Semitic replies in response to charity requests he received in the mail?

That she ruled against the plaintiff in 80% of race discrimination cases?

That in her famous speech she also said stuff like:

I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.

The horror!

I am so sick of people taking one fragment of a speech or one ruling and rushing to judgment based on their own biases and agendas. Take a deep breath. Read Ricci. Read the Pappas dissent. Then let us know what you think.

These days, unless there is an important Constitutional interpretation at stake, the Court will typically pass on the case.

Not true. Let's just look at the opinions issued today.

• Hawaii v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Issue: Whether a 1993 congressional resolution requires Hawaii to reach a political settlement with native Hawaiians before transferring some 1.2 million acres of state land.
• Rivera v. Illinois, Issue: Whether the erroneous denial of a criminal defendantâ(TM)s preemptory challenge that resulted in the challenged juror being seated requires automatic reversal of a conviction.
• Philip Morris USA, Inc. v. Williams, Issue: Whether the Supreme Court of Oregon, on remand from the Courtâ(TM)s 2007 decision on the constitutionality of a $79.5 million punitive damages award based on harms done to non-named plaintiffs, improperly asserted a state law procedural bar having the effect of precluding Phillip Morris from asserting a constitutional claim.

Now, it is entirely possible that by "important Constitutional interpretation," you meant "issue that touches on the Constitution." However, that would be so broad as to be meaningless. Everything that may be tried in federal court touches on the Constitution in some way, even in mere diversity cases. It would be like stating that "these days, all cases before the Supreme Court involve some legal controversy."

So I'm assuming you mean that the core issues are about interpreting some provision about the Constitution.

The three links above are decent evidence against your assertion.

I'll leave out really common feeds and a few that won't interest many people, but here are the top 25% or so of my feeds:

A Gentleman's C http://gentlemansc.blogspot.com/rss.xml
An Angry Professor gripes about stuff

Armchair Generalist http://armchairgeneralist.typepad.com/my_weblog/index.rdf
Blog by a moderate-left military analyst

Arts & Letters Daily http://aldaily.com/rss/rss.xml
Three interesting links every day (actually usually one or two INTERESTING ones)

Breaking News (History News Network) http://hnn.us/roundup/rss_full/41.xml
Stories about History with a slight conservative bias

Consumerist http://consumerist.com/excerpts.xml
Shoppers bite back.

indexed http://indexed.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
Note card humor, usually featuring Venn diagrams

Inside Higher Ed http://feeds.feedburner.com/insidehighered/OxmP
Stories from academe, with fairly grumpy comments

Junk Charts http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/rss.xml
Redraws charts to make data analysis easier

Obscure Store and Reading Room http://obscurestore.typepad.com/obscure_store_and_reading/index.rdf
Well-known wierd news site with comments

PostSecret http://postsecret.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Secrets on postcards, every Sunday. Fascinating.

ReelViews New Reviews http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReelviewsNewReviews
My favorite currently-active film reviewer

SCOTUSblog http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/index.xml
Get the skinny on the latest Supreme Court actions

Slashfood http://www.slashfood.com/rss.xml
Because I love food

Slate Magazine http://www.slate.com/rss/
The best of the online political mags; lefty bias

Spluch http://spluch.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Always something interesting. Similar material to the extremely popular Boing Boing, but with fewer posts per day.

The Monkey Cage http://www.themonkeycage.org/atom.xml
Analysis from political scientists. Much better than the usual partisan approach.

The Onion http://feeds.theonion.com/theonion/daily
Most of the humor is usually contained in the headlines, so I seldom read more

The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court's blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today. The President relied on our settled prece-dent in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763 (1950), when he established the prison at Guantanamo Bay for enemy aliens. Citing that case, the President's Office of Legal Counsel advised him "that the great weight of legal authority indicates that a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien de-tained at [Guantanamo Bay]." Memorandum from Patrick F. Philbin and John C. Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorneys General, Office of Legal Counsel, to William J. Haynes II, General Counsel, Dept. of Defense (Dec. 28, 2001). Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves.

In the long term, then, the Court's decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating. At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield. See S. Rep. No. 110-90, pt. 7, p. 13 (2007) (Minority Views of Sens. Kyl, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, and Coburn) (hereinafter Minority Report). Some have been captured or killed. See ibid.; see also Mintz, Released Detainees Rejoining the Fight, Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2004, pp. A1, A12. But others have succeeded in carrying on their atrocities against innocent civilians. In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. See Khan & Lancaster, Pakistanis Rescue Hostage; 2nd Dies, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2004, p. A18. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Mintz, supra. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. See White, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack, Washington Post, May 8, 2008, p. A18.

These, mind you, were detainees whom the military had concluded were not enemy combatants. Their return to the kill illustrates the incredible difficulty of assessing who is and who is not an enemy combatant in a foreign theater of operations where the environment does not lend itself to rigorous evidence collection. Astoundingly, the Court today raises the bar, requiring military officials to appear before civilian courts and defend their decisions under procedural and evidentiary rules that go beyond what Congress has specified. As THE CHIEF JUSTICE's dissent makes clear, we have no idea what those proce- dural and evidentiary rules are, but they will be deter-mined by civil courts and (in the Court's contemplation atleast) will be more detainee-friendly than those now ap-plied, since otherwise there would no reason to hold the congressionally prescribed procedures unconstitutional. If t

They left off that in Scalia's dissenting opinion he said things like:

"The game of bait-and-switch that todayâ(TM)s opinion plays upon the Nationâ(TM)s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

"Today the Court warps our Constitution."

"The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today."

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Recommended reading that didn't make it into this story's writeup:

Glenn Greenwald, Supreme Court restores habeas corpus:

In a major rebuke to the Bush administration's theories of presidential power -- and in an equally stinging rebuke to the bipartisan political class which has supported the Bush detention policies -- the U.S. Supreme Court today, in a 5-4 decision (.pdf), declared Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 unconstitutional. The Court struck down that section of the MCA because it purported to abolish the writ of habeas corpus...

Glenn Greenwald, Conservative vs. authoritarianism:

To our country's pseudo-tough-guy "conservatives," the very idea of merely requiring the Government to prove the guilt of the people it wants to imprison for life or execute is so intolerable, so offensive, that they want instead to release them all -- including detainees who are indisputably innocent -- onto a battlefield so that they can be slaughtered by our planes with no trial at all. [...]

The question I put to him again and again was one that he simply couldn't answer: how and why would any American object to the mere requirement that our Government prove that someone is guilty before we imprison them indefinitely or execute them?

The decision itself, with my favorite passage being:

Yet the Government's view is that the Constitution had no effect there [at Guantanamo], at least as to noncitizens, because the United States disclaimed sovereignty in the formal sense of the term. The necessary implication of the argument is that by surrendering formal sovereignty over any unincorporated territory to a third party, while at the same time entering into a lease that grants total control over the territory back to the United States, it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal constraint.

Our basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. Even when the United States acts outside its borders, its powers are not "absolute and unlimited" but are subject "to such restrictions as are expressed in the Constitution." Murphy v. Ramsey, 114 U. S. 15, 44 (1885). Abstaining from questions involving formal sovereignty and territorial governance is one thing. To hold the political branches have the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will is quite another. The former position reflects this Court's recognition that certain matters requiring political judgments are best left to the political branches. The latter would permit a striking anomaly in our tripartite system of government, leading to a regime in which Congress and the President, not this Court, say "what the law is." Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803).

In that passage, the Court upbraids the Bush administration, which sought this unconstitutional law and argued to uphold it, for claiming that the President has the right to "switch the Constitution on or off at will." The Court is absolutely correct about this, there is no doubt that this is what our current President has attempted. And the Court is correct that this is an attempt to circumvent the system of separation of powers that is at the heart of the "basic charter" on which the United States was founded.

The fact that this decision was a slim 5-4 majority, with this President's two appointees making up half the dissenting view, is a frightening thought.

Yes.

Only Anthony Kennedy was in the majority in every 5-4 decision. If you need it visually, it is at: http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/Fin al5-4visual.pdf

There were 24 5-4 cases, of which the 5 you are referring to were the 5 in 13, and not in 11. http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/OT0 6SummaryInfo.pdf (second page)

Anti-trust is historically less political than other areas, such as civil rights or constitutional law. So while it was the classical conservative 5 this time, it was by no means a lock.

Yes.

Only Anthony Kennedy was in the majority in every 5-4 decision. If you need it visually, it is at: http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/Fin al5-4visual.pdf

There were 24 5-4 cases, of which the 5 you are referring to were the 5 in 13, and not in 11. http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/OT0 6SummaryInfo.pdf (second page)

Anti-trust is historically less political than other areas, such as civil rights or constitutional law. So while it was the classical conservative 5 this time, it was by no means a lock.

At least one court is looking at the legality of parts of the Military Commissions Act. The part about declaring a citizen an enemy combatant and then not giving them due process.

http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/200 7/06/president_denie.html

This is a step. Definitely not enough to overturn everything, but a good step in the right direction.

From the link:

"The President cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention," the Court said.

We will have to see how this plays out.

It might be more instructional than reading dozens of comments that start with, "I don't know a thing about law, but... ." It's like marketers talking about programming: "I don't know C# from sharp cheddar, but... ." Here are a few views from lawyers who know patent law:

KSR v. Teleflex:

• Workmanlike, yet frustrating
• A narrow ruling

Microsoft v. AT&T:

• Get a patent overseas, or get Congress to change the law
• Nervous about the result

It might be more instructional than reading dozens of comments that start with, "I don't know a thing about law, but... ." It's like marketers talking about programming: "I don't know C# from sharp cheddar, but... ." Here are a few views from lawyers who know patent law:

KSR v. Teleflex:

• Workmanlike, yet frustrating
• A narrow ruling

Microsoft v. AT&T:

• Get a patent overseas, or get Congress to change the law
• Nervous about the result