TRUMP IS A THIEF | Shorthanded Court Considers How Far Is Too Far | The Next Gun Fight at SCOTUS, Greenhouse Previews
January 19, 2017
BABY YOU COULD HAVE WHATEVER YOU LIKE
|It looks like the Slants—the Asian-American rock band responsible for the trademark case before the high court yesterday—just might get exactly what they want. Justices appeared sympathetic to the band in its battle against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office which refused to register the band’s name because of a section of the Lanham Act that prohibits “disparaging trademarks.” Even so, the justices seemed to struggle over finding a way to limit the implications of a ruling.
TRUMP IS A THIEF
|During oral argument yesterday in Lee v. Tam, JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR posed a hypothetical question starring none other than the man who is about to be our next president. Cristian Farias with The Huffington Post reports Justice Sotomayor wanted to know whether a trademark disparaging the president-elect would survive a constitutional challenge. “If someone slanders or libels an individual by saying Trump, before he was a public figure, ‘Trump is a Thief,’ and that becomes their trademark,” she said, “[Then] even if they go to court and prove that that’s a libel or a slander, that trademark would still exist and would be capable of use, because otherwise, canceling it would be an abridgment of the First Amendment?”
HOW FAR IS TOO FAR
|The Supreme Court appeared divided yesterday hearing a case that questions whether or not 172 mostly Muslim men rounded up in immigration sweeps following the Sept. 11 attacks can sue former Attorney General JOHN ASHCROFT and other officials for holding them under severe conditions before being deported. Conservative justices seemed willing to give the officials legal protection from lawsuits, citing extraordinary circumstance during a national emergency. Meanwhile, the liberal justices expressed concern for officials sometimes going too far. JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER: “And if they have gone too far, it is our job to say that.” The court was even more shorthanded than normal because JUSTICES ELENA KAGAN and SONIA SOTOMAYOR recused themselves from the case because of their earlier work in the solicitor general’s office and on the 2nd Circuit.
BANGARANG
|Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times looks ahead to the next gun battle the Supreme Court will face, previewing Peruta v. California, a case that justices will have to decide whether or not to consider later this year. Greenhouse: “In California legal circles, the Peruta case looms large; it has been pending in one federal court or another for nearly eight years, a political lifetime. The case was intended to set the boundaries that JUSTICE SCALIA acknowledged in Heller: if the Second Amendment right is ‘not unlimited,’ then what are its limits? Arriving at the Supreme Court at this moment of supreme uncertainty, the case seems like to test the court’s limits as well.”
PODCAST DU JOUR
|Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick considers how DONALD TRUMP will reshape the Supreme Court in her latest Amicus podcast.
OTHER NEWS
Nonlawyer Judges? SCOTUS Doesn't Seem to Mind
The National Law Journal“A judge who is in a position to throw someone in jail has to be lawyer, right? Well no, and the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed this anomaly of American justice to persist.”
The EPA's Remarkable Record in Environmental Law's Most Important Court
The Huffington Post“With all of this criticism, one might assume that EPA would have a mixed, or even a miserable, track record in the courts. After examining the past two years’ worth of decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (D.C. Circuit) in cases relating to EPA’s air quality regulations, it turns out this assumption is wrong. On the contrary, these regulations and the science upon which they are based have withstood a remarkable amount of legal scrutiny.”