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.
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]
Some random reading recommendations, which don’t have much to do with law. But that’s what weekends are for, right?
* Suffering from Entourage withdrawal? Read about a real-life agent dumping (by Jim Carrey). [Defamer]
* Suffering from Project Runway withdrawal, since there was no new episode this week? Get your hands on the New Yorker’s fantastic fashion issue. The profile of Diane von Furstenberg — by Larissa MacFarquhar, who once profiled Judge Richard Posner — is especially worthwhile. So is Andrea Lee’s article about high-end handbags (“The Bag Lady”). [New Yorker (table of contents; most articles not online)]
* Suffering from Harriet Miers withdrawal? Head over to the blog of Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston. Then run a search (ctrl-F) for “LOL.” [Cardinal Seán’s Blog via New York Times]
Another day, another circuit court decision involving a school kid with a wise-ass t-shirt.
Earlier this year, the Ninth Circuit dealt with the case of a kid who wore a T-shirt to school that read, “Be ashamed, our school embraced what God has condemned. Homosexuality is shameful.” (The kid lost; and that’s why they call it the Ninth Circuit.)
Today, the Second Circuit also ruled in favor of the student, on these facts:
[T]he images depicted on the shirt were a martini glass, three lines of cocaine, a razor blade and a straw. According to the court, the alcohol and drug-related images were intended to portray President Bush as a former alcohol and drug user.
The school allowed a large picture of the president’s face, wearing a helmet, superimposed on the body of a chicken. The shirt identified Bush as “Chicken-Hawk-In-Chief.” But it demanded that Zachary cover the alcohol and drug-related images. He did so with duct tape on which he wrote “censored.”
Zachary and his parents then filed suit claiming that he had been required to cover the images in violation of his free speech rights.
These cases are quite en vogue. And even though the slogan wasn’t on his clothing, don’t forget the kid with the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner, which Ken Starr is appealing to the Supreme Court.
We like these cases, ’cause they’re more interesting than typical appeals court fare. But they must be quite a headache from the perspective of school administrators — and certainly another argument in favor of dress codes.
Picture this: “Express Yourself,” a Project Runway challenge in which the designers would have to produce an “expressive” outfits. Wouldn’t that be great?
But don’t hold your breath waiting for this. Last year we submitted a feedback form to the Project Runway website, suggesting that they hold a judicial robe design challenge — with the wild ‘n wacky Judge Alex Kozinski as the guest judge. Alas, they haven’t gotten back to us. ‘Offensive’ Speech Gets Narrow Reading at 2nd Circuit [New York Law Journal] Rehearing on T-shirt is denied [San Francisco Chronicle] Project Runway [official website]
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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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!
