A new Supreme Court term begins

After the coming weekend, it is October, and the U.S. Supreme Court is back in the courtroom. I will use this occasion to congratulate the Court in sticking to its guns in the matter of one of the more notable decisions of last term, ALLEN v. MILLIGAN, while the legislature of the state of Alabama remains in defiance.

The courts below are attempting to hold the state to the terms of the quite clear SCOTUS decision in MILLIGAN, and the state has responded by appealing to SCOTUS again, asking it to change its mind. This is not a matter of stare decisis. It is a matter of res judicata. That matter has been determined. By a single sentence ruling, with no dissent, the high court this week refused to hear the matter, so this spring's order, and the enforcement actions of the lower courts, will take effect.

That said, I will merely mention today three cases to be heard by the court in its new term about which I have some curiosity.

1. Murray v. UBS Securities, and the rules for whistle blowers under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. SOX came about after a wave of corporate accounting/fraud scandals involving publicly traded entities: Enron, WorldCom, and so forth. Those who blow the whistle on such shenanigans are allowed to sue their employers over retaliatory filings. But there is some disagreement among the circuit courts as to who bears the burden of proof on the crucial matter of retaliatory motive. The court will hear arguments on this in its October sitting.

2. Culley v. Marshall, about post-seizure probable cause hearings prior to judicial forfeitures and the application of speedy trial rules to such hearings. This is for the November sitting. Law enforcement has become a profit center for some municipalities, which have every incentive to seize and secure title to expensive automobiles on any pretext. This litigation is a test of the guardrails around that trend.

3. Vidal v. Elster. This, again, is for the November sitting. It concerns the intersection of trademark law and the first amendment. The court will be asked to strike as unconstitutional section 1052(c) of Title 15, which provides in pertinent part that a trademark shall be refused registration if it “[c]onsists of or comprises a name * * * identifying a particular living individual except by his written consent.” The case arose from a proposed trademark of the phrase "Trump too small," intended for tee-shirts. In the nature of things, the rule of section 1052(c) will generally apply to public figures -- public enough to be worth mocking on a tee shirt for which their approval is not required.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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