Bush Supreme Court Nominee Former Microsoft Lawyer

DaveM writes "Bush's most recent Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, successfully argued that people who were sold defective software by Microsoft weren't "injured," and couldn't participate in a class action against the company. The case involved unstable compression features in MS DOS 6.0, which were corrected by a $9.95 update, MS DOS 6.2. Plaintiffs wanted Microsoft to offer the updates for free, but eventually lost to Miers' arguments."

Comments

Re:What do you expect?

[GreyPoopon]

What was she supposed to argue? "My client is guilty."?

And more importantly, if you read through other news articles about her, you'll see that many of her arguments are highly based on logic. In the mentioned Microsoft case, her argument was against the "class" that was chosen for the lawsuit. The plaintiffs chose everyone who bought DOS 6.0 as for the class, arguing that they had been harmed and shouldn't have to pay $10 for an upgrade. However, not everybody who bought the product was using, or intended to use the compression features, so it was difficult to justify including all of them in the class. Therefore, the class was decertified. The suit was dismissed and dropped because the lawyer representing the plaintiffs didn't want to bother with actually getting a more reasonable class determined for the suit.

Re:oh god

[ari_j]

Thank you, Findlaw. :) Here is a list of Supreme Court justices with no prior judicial experience.

Re:Nice flaming headline.

[Whafro]

Many top-tier firms, including the one for which I am currently employed, require all associates to perform a percentage of billable hours on a pro-bono basis. In my case, it is at least sixty hours per attorney per year, or three percent of billable hours. That is approximately equal to a week's work.

Re:Indictments at the Gates

[Captain Sarcastic]

Sometimes party registration is a local thing.

Consider Kansas. It's a primarily Republican state. Outside of a few counties, almost all of the state offices go to members of the Republican party.

This usually means that, during primary season, the Democrats try to find someone that is willing to fight a battle where they are most likely out-recognized and out-spent by the existing Republican contender, unless the Republican has done something egregious. It's extremely rare for the Democrats to run more than one person for a seat during the primaries.

In Kansas (and in other states), the Republican primaries are closed primaries - the only people who can vote in them are party members (the Democrat primaries are open to anyone not voting Republican). As a result, some people who see no other way to get their voice heard become "paper Republicans." This lets them have some say in who is running in November, and can at least try to trim off some of the extremists at the primary level.

And sometimes it even works...