Slashdot Mirror
Conflicted Judges Are Classier With English Accents
An anonymous reader writes "Remember The Right Honourable Professor Sir Robin Jacob, Retired Lord Justice, who staged a temporary comeback on the bench of the England and Wales Court of Appeals last fall? He's the one who required Apple to publicly retract its claims that Samsung copied the iPad and imposed sanctions on Cupertino when he concluded Tim Cook's lawyers hadn't fully complied. He has now made worldwide headline news again because he signed up as a Samsung expert witness at the U.S. International Trade Commission. Samsung says he was hired by its law firm, not the company, but the ITC filing says 'Sir Robin Jacob working on behalf of Samsung.' His clerk issued a statement according to which Sir Robin had no idea of Samsung's desire to hire him before January — two months after he gave Apple a blast. Leading legal blogs agree that there is no evidence any law was violated, but they suspect that 'the general issue of what engagements retired judges are permitted to accept will be very much up for discussion' and that this was 'a less than savvy public relations move by Samsung' because it casts doubt on the widely-noticed ruling in its favor. As one of them puts it, in the U.K. you 'never know if the judge might be looking for a new job,' so you better 'make sure [you] have fat rolls of cash spilling out of [your] pockets' in front of a U.K. judge."
looks bad but in reality a judge like this will probably preside over cases with most companies in a given countries and lots of other large organizations. even if you institute a 2-3 year rule of not taking a job with a party to a lawsuit you preside over that is a lot of potential work and probably infringes on non-compete laws
This rises a smidge above the appearance of impropiety.
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Perhaps the judge's expertise is due to the fact that he spent months listening to both sides of the matter, sifting through conflicting evidence and judging the validity of the positions to come up with an unbiased conclusion. There would be no better expert on the case than the judge that heard it. He would be the best person to explain why he made the decision that he did and be the best one to convince others of his logic. It is not necessarily a judge giving a decision so he can get a future job. This is another instance of appearance of conflict being more important that actual conflict.
Casting doubt is not an issue. If another judge reviewed the ruling and found fault then there would be an issue. Every ruling should be able to be reviewed at any time without the review causing issues. The whole "There is a review there must be something wrong" is stupid. Wait for the review to be over and then make a judgement. Many reviews are done to remove appearances of conflict and prove that no conflict existed.
Apple already has the patent on buying judges.
I predict lawsuits.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Other the the word 'judge', what the fuck does the headline have to do with the summary? Is slashdot trying to get some sort of record for worst 'journalism' ever?
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The press has stopped listening to Mr Mueller, but there are still some lazy bloggers out their which take the bait. Mr Mueller when you point a finger at someone else the rest of the four fingers point at you and looking at your monotonous track-record (which is getting painfully boring). Mr Mueller should add a disclaimer to all of your posts that he gets paid by Microsoft and Oracle so people know "For someone so concerned with "integrity" it is utterly unusual to write extremely biased blogs against a particular party (Android in this case) only to be hired as a consultant by the opposition parties (Microsoft and Oracle in this case)."