The Ninth Circuit may be getting slapped around by the Supreme Court lately. (Yeah, what else is new.) But they continue to go about their business. Keep on truckin’, Your Honors!
One of you was kind enough to attend a recent Ninth Circuit sitting — not just any old sitting, but the one graced by that judicial celebrity, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — and send us a detailed report.
That account of the oral argument — plus a bonus judicial sight-ation, and some added commentary from us — appears after the jump.
* For those of you hipsters moaning about gentrification in your respective cities (but really, where is this clamor louder than in New York City?), is this what you mean by “keeping it real”? [New York Daily News via Althouse]
* While we all know what happens to pedophiles in jail, this guy should at least be thankful he didn’t find himself on the receiving end of Chris Hansen’s indignant gaze on national television. [New York Law Journal (free access available for only one more week)]
* Anything to avoid the future in-laws. [MSNBC]
* Judging from your response to our round-up of Craigslist postings, we know you’ve also partaken of those delightful “Missed Connections” on more than one occasion. Fodder for a future Non-Sequiturs. [Kizmeet]
* Is this any stranger than women applying mascara in the car? Yeah, someone should put a warning on mascara. And, as a sidenote, how cute is it that Professor Childs hosts an indie kids’ music show with his own kid? [TortsProf Blog]
* But they’ll still believe what they see on MTV and read on MySpace. [MoJo Blog]
* Creative types, lawyers, and other copyright enforcers get together to fight crime. Coming to a city near you. [Boing Boing]
* Philly cheesesteaks and porn, caught in the crossfire. [QuizLaw]
* Possibly the oldest man in the world (until yesterday) attributes his long life to never cheating or saying anything bad about anyone. He was obviously not a lawyer. Or a blogger. [The Economist]
* For those of you who have been following this tragic, disturbing, local New York story, here is an update. Parents everywhere still wonder whether they would have done the same thing. [Associated Press]
Now that we have the able assistance of Stella Q for Non-Sequiturs — check out her great post from yesterday — we have no place for random links that catch our eye, but don’t merit full treatment in a separate post. Blogospheric leftovers, if you will.
So here’s a special midday “bonus edition” of Non-Sequiturs:
* “Law porn”: Glenn Reynolds is not turned on. [Instapundit]
* Wherever there’s a financial debacle, the plaintiffs’ lawyers can’t be far behind. [DealBreaker]
* Project Runway: We were thinking (and hoping) that Uli Herzner would win. But Professor Althouse called this one correctly. [Althouse]
* This paper sounds interesting. Can it justify damage awards that include payments for prostitute visits? [PrawfsBlawg]
* “[T]he Nietzschean alternative: a postmodern appropriation of pop culture that turns an entire class into a video game.” Unorthodox? Certainly. But it also sounds kinda fun. [Concurring Opinions]
* Forget about Kansas’Kansas’sKansas’ issues. What’s the matter with Namibia? [WSJ Law Blog]
* CNN has its finger on the pulse of America — and Orin Kerr is giggling. [Volokh Conspiracy]
Partners at top investment bank Goldman Sachs take home an average of $7 million a year. But not content with that, they’ve decided to chase after a small businessman, who’s just trying to make an honest living.
From the WSJ Law Blog:
[Goldman Sachs is involved in an] ongoing battle with Goldman Advertisement BV, a Netherlands-based adult-entertainment directory…. Goldman argued [in a National Arbitration Forum proceeding] that goldmansex.com would cause confusion and contained links to objectionable “adult” material. The NAF agreed with the investment bank, and goldmansex.com is no more.
Say it ain’t so! Who would confuse the world’s leading investment bank with a porn providers’ directory? (Our big brother blog, which covered this story back in July, agrees.)
“Goldman” is a last name that strikes us as pretty generic, and “sex” is, well, sex. GS’s position strikes us as weak, whether viewed from a cybersquatting or trademark law perspective. And there’s more:
Rob Muller, the owner of goldmansex.com, tells the Law Blog in an email that the name has nothing to do with the investment bank; instead, it came from his nickname “Goldman,” which his friends gave him because they “thought I was always lucky in my life.”…
After the NAF ruling, Muller pressed his luck and continued to use another domain name it owned — goldmEnsex.com (emphasis added). Last week, according to Muller, he received a fax from the NAF informing him that Goldman Sachs had started a new proceeding against his company.
Frivolous litigation arbitration. Why can’t the banking behemoth just laugh it off, and let poor Rob Muller go on his merry way? Consider this:
“Goldmansex was in a completely different business than GS, with no chance of confusion, we were not referring to Goldman Sachs on our website, the site had a complete different look and feel and we own a valid trademark in the domain name,” says Muller. “The only similarity between Goldman Sachs and Goldmensex is the verbal equivalence.” He adds: “Furthermore Goldmensex is not a porn site; it is an advertisement portal for adult entertainers offering information very similar to information offered by Google and Yellow Pages.”
And the verbal equivalence isn’t even that great. “Goldman Sachs” sounds like “Goldman Sex” only if you pronounce it with a really heavy Russian accent.
This is so wrong. Rob Muller needs your help, ATL readers. Anyone looking for a good pro bono [sic] project? After Taking Down Goldmansex, Goldman Takes On Goldmensex [WSJ Law Blog] There Is No Sex in Goldman Sachs [DealBreaker]
The political blogosphere, including our former home, is having tons of fun with the downfall of Mark Foley — you know, the House Republican from Florida who sent smutty emails and IMs to underage male pages.
Well, the legislative branch doesn’t have a monopoly on naughty talk. This latest story is about a state rather than federal judge (of course), but it does show that judges know how to get down ‘n dirty:
Justice of the Peace Sam Harris, who blew the whistle several years ago on a colleague viewing pornographic Web sites on the job, admitted Monday to using profanity and graphic language in an online chat room.
On Saturday, Feb. 25, he wrote: “When in doubt, show Sam ur titties. But you don’t have those, so lol (laugh out loud) away.”
It might violate principles of comity, but can some federal judge out there please enjoin state court judges from using “LOL”? (Yes, we use “LOL” sometimes in email correspondence — but we’re bloggers, so that’s okay.)
The chat room is connected to an online video game called “Gore.” In August, Harris wrote in the chat that he played the game on the Web site one to six hours a day, running up more than 5,000 hours of play.
Well! It seems that this is one judge who likes to play with his joystick, in addition to banging his gavel.
And Judge Harris also has no qualms about giving people a peek beneath his robe:
At 5:06 p.m. Monday, March 6, Harris wrote to a friend about a vasectomy: “Jesus God help me, but it just hurts thinking about it. I know you would rather I didn’t hope’ anything about ur balls, but still hope it ain’t that bad. I get ALOT of pressure to get clipped. Scared. Very scared.”
TMI. Additional excerpts from Justice Harris’s chat room postings are collected over at the Electric City Weblog. This quote is our favorite:
Harris said the gay porn images [he caught his colleague viewing] “will remain with me for the rest of my life.” He said he “couldn’t sleep that night and kept visualizing another of the screen images of ‘one man giving another man oral sex.’” Earlier Harris had said that, as a result of viewing the images, “my stomach has been upset and I am having difficulty sleeping.”
Okay, maybe he should be “Judge of Yesterday,” since this was in yesterday’s paper (and was picked up by How Appealing yesterday too). But it’s Saturday, and we’re still working hard to entertain you, so stop your quibbling.
A judge who repeatedly viewed pornography on the computer in his chambers apologized Friday after receiving a public reprimand from the Florida Supreme Court for violating judicial ethics.
Circuit Judge Brandt C. Downey III of Clearwater told the high court he was “sorry” after Chief Justice R. Fred Lewis called his conduct “truly shocking” and an embarrassment to his friends, his family, the judiciary and the citizens of Florida.
It may have been, er, somewhat imprudent for Judge Downey to check out porn in chambers. But at the risk of sounding like libertines, we have to ask: What’s the big deal? Millions of Americans enjoy pornography.
As for the workplace aspect, we say: If he’s keeping up with his judicial workload, who cares about de minimis use of his computer for, um, other activities? Is it that different from, say, making flight arrangements online for your Hawaiian vacation, while on your lunch break?
To put it another way: What’s wrong with a judge admitting he shares something in common with at least 14 percent of American men? (A figure that’s surely on the low side, due to the study’s reliance upon self-reporting.)
What’s next? Judges getting censured for banging their own gavels? What century are we living in? Or, for that matter, what country — a theocracy?
[At the hearing, Judge Downey] added that he believes God has forgiven him. He said his family and friends also have forgiven him and urged him to seek re-election, but he declined to avoid further embarrassment and publicity, Downey said.
So we don’t think judicial porn viewing is such a big deal. These allegations are far more problematic:
Downey allegedly showed inordinate interest in a young state attorney, asking her to approach the bench to tell her that she “looked nice today.”
He also was accused of asking another female lawyer to approach the bench for personal conversation and sending her an e-mail saying “it was nice seeing u in court looking so pretty.”
We’ve already named William DiSalvatore our Lawyer of the Day, so that award is off the table. But if DiSalvatore hadn’t already grabbed the laurels, Kweku Hanson, of Hartford, Connecticut, would have been a deserving winner. Here’s why:
Sexual assault and child pornography charges pending against Hartford attorney Kweku J. Hanson aren’t enough to warrant the interim suspension of his law license. At least not in Hartford Superior Court Judge Lois B. Tanzer’s view.
Okay, fine, Hanson has only been charged, not convicted. Innocent until proven guilty, blah blah blah. But we couldn’t help noticing certain salacious details. Check ‘em out, after the jump.
* Immigration judges will be subject to annual performance reviews for the first time ever. Now the full extent of their incompetence will be revealed. [New York Times]
* Attorneys for the deceased Ken Lay begin the process of posthumously clearing his name. Death has some fringe benefits. [Houston Chronicle]
* You don’t need a lawyer to tell you this: Downloading kiddie porn on your office computer is a bad idea. A really bad idea. [San Francisco Chronicle]
* The Eighth Circuit upholds strip searches of juveniles; county detention center officials rejoice. Those guys are such perverts… [Sioux Falls Argus Leader]
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The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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The Ninth Circuit may be getting slapped around by the Supreme Court lately. (Yeah, what else is new.) But they continue to go about their business. Keep on truckin’, Your Honors!
