Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Welcome back. We'll look at four cases, arranging in increasing order of the height of their media profile. Death with the Assistance of Counsel Diving right in there: in McCOY v. LOUISIANA (May 14)  the Court found that the "effective assistance of counsel" guaranteed by the 6th amendment to the Constitution requires that the defendant be able to choose the objective of his defense -- that is, whether the defense should be to concede the crime but plead mitigating circumstances, or whether it should deny guilt. In the case before the court, McCoy's attorney, Robert English, admitted to the jury repeatedly, and against his client's repeated instructions, that his client "committed three murders." Indeed, he told them there was "no way reasonably possible" that they could hear the case and come to any other conclusion than that McCoy was "the cause of these individuals' deaths." He tried to make the case for mercy, for seei...

A federal appeals court recently ruled that a patent on a successful birth control product is invalid  because the patent owner made an offer to sell the invention more than one year before it applied for said patent.  This sounds like a straightforward application of what patent lawyers call the "on sale bar." MERCK & Cie v. WATSON LABS, 125 F.Supp 3d 503 (D. Del. 2015). Merck is appealing this to the SCOTUS. It sought a "stay of mandate," that is, it tried to get Chief Justice Roberts to rule that the decision would not take effect until the high court heard and decided the matter. But they failed to get the stay, so Watson, the generic drug manufacturer, gets to sell the drug at issue in the US pending further developments. Here's a relevant brief from Watson's lawyers. On July 27, Roberts denied that application for stay in a brief order, providing no rationale. Merck's argument is that what it did more than one year prior to the applic...