I admit to having very mixed feelings about the whole TikTok issue. Let's review. The US House of Representatives has passed, in what is nowadays an impressively bipartisan vote, (and with 352 yeas) a bill that would force Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok or face a US ban. A study last year out of Rutgers University indicated a "strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government." Perhaps more worrying, the broad use of TikTok is a means by which interests in China may build up a database on Americans and America, and whoever at ByteDance can get that information would be susceptible to demands from his/her government to pass it along. What information exactly (aside from dance trends) would China get in this way that it could turn to nefarious purposes? It could help identify targets for recruitment for espionage, or data could be crossed-chec...
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Jack Daniels Properties, the corporate owner of trademarks associated with Jack Daniels, a brand of whiskey, won a high profile intellectual property case this term. The case involved a dog toy in the shape of a bottle of whiskey, with markings that reference Jack Daniels in a way that ALSO references dog poop. For example, the pseudo-bottle bears a rhyming code name, "Bad Spaniels." Where a bottle of JD whiskey bears the familiar description "Old No. 7 Brand Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey" the dog-toy doppelganger says " The old No 2 on your Tennessee carpet." Whether you find punning poop jokes funny is a matter of taste. The "Bad Spaniels" decision is now a matter for the law books. The district court granted summary judgment to the dog-toy makers. The appeals court affirmed that judgment and JD appealed. The defenders of the brand won before SCOTUS, which offered its own reading of the law and remanded for further cons...
One big piece of news about the end of the Supreme Court's term is that it came without an announcement of anyone's retirement. There is no vacancy, thus we do not face the prospect of any further Trump effort to fill another seat through the remainder of his term. That's a good thing. As to the cases, I'd like to have something to say here about five as yet unmentioned. All of them important. Abortion Rights I've mentioned before a decision this term that may have helped persuade the evangelical Christian core of the Trump coalition that he isn't delivering for them: the reading of the civil rights act so as to protect gay employees from firings. Here we reach another decision that might contribute to that disenchantment. And everything that weakens the Orange Dynast politically is at this moment a good thing. Abortion rights survive. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-1323_c07d.pdf The case this session was June Medical Services v...
Well, there is this: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-religion/u-s-supreme-court-declines-to-hear-religious-clash-on-washington-transit-ads-idUSKBN21O1S3 The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington had sought to buy ad space on the subways. The ad would have featured an image of three shepherds and two sheep -- the shepherds looking at a star, with a verse from Matthew, "Behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy." Beneath this was a URL, FindthePerfectGift.org The phrase "find the perfect gift" could of course be used by a mall or department store or by amazon.com. But if you go to the URL, you'll find that the "perfect gift" you are being asked to find is God's love. Back in 1974, in the LEHMAN v. SHAKER HEIGHTS case, the US Supreme Court spoke to the decisions of transit authorities on such matters. The Lehman decision said that a bus or the like "is not a park or sidewalk or other public place for discussion....
A well written editorial in the Vancouver Sun explains that there is and should not be any prohibition or sanction on the criticism of religions in Canada. It makes the basic old John Stuart Mill points. Tolerance doesn't just mean tolerance of a belief, religion, or way of life, etc. It means tolerance of its critics. It means nobody gets to be a 'snowflake,' even in Canada, where non-metaphorical snowflakes are so common. Why do these old and familiar points have to be made? Because as the op-ed says, some definitions of "Islamophobia" would include and stigmatize as potential targets of government disfavor "any criticism of Muslim people or Islamic practices -- be it political, cultural, or religious." The sort of government disfavor involved is generally left unspecified in this context and, since this is Canada, would probably be 'nice.' Soft power and all that. Still: the Sun is right and the idea is repugnant. Let the sky ring wi...
Eric Voegelin was a political philosopher of some repute at the time of his death in 1985, but whose repute has fallen somewhat since. If one had to express Voegelin's views in one quick phrase, it would be, "gnosis is bad." Or, not so quickly, "Gnosticism is bad." Gnosticism in the relevant sense is a certainty about one's own rightness, usually coupled with a desire to create a heaven on earth. Bad stuff, that. Here is a great quote from EV: "[T]here has emerged a phenomenon unknown to antiquity that permeates our modern societies so completely that its ubiquity scarcely leaves us any room to see it at all: the prohibition of questioning. This is not a matter of resistance to analysis – that existed in antiquity as well. It does not involve those who cling to opinions by reason of tradition or emotion, or those who engage in debate in a naïve confidence in the rightness of their opinions and who take the offensive only when analysis unnerves t...
I recently read an article about the cancellation of a planned appearance at UC Davis of alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and Martin Shkreli. Seems like a classic instance of "heckler's veto." I don't care about MY especially. The references to MS in this story piqued my interest, though. You may remember that Shkreli, pictured above, was formerly a pharmaceutical CEO, accused of jacking up prices of life-saving drugs unconscionably and of committing securities fraud in the process. He was arrested by the FBI a little more than a year ago, December 2015. It struck me when I heard about this UC Davis thing that it has been a long time since I had heard anything more about the proceedings. I gather he has been out on bail pending trial ever since. But this seems like a fairly long time to pass without any news. There once was a time, not long ago, when I would have been following the case in detail, and I'd know about discovery motions, evidentia...
Susan B. Anthony List is an organization opposed both to abortion and to the Obamacare Act. During the congressional campaigns on 2010, the SBA List bought a billboard ad in the 1st Congressional District of Ohio (which includes most of the city of Cincinnati, and which was represented at the time in the US Congress by Steven Driehaus). The ad would have consisted of a photo of Driehaus and the words, "Shame on Steven Driehaus! Driehaus voted FOR taxpayer-funded abortion!" I say it "would have" consisted of this, because the billboard was never actually erected. Driehaus' campaign, with the help of the Ohio Elections Commission, was able to persuade the billboard company to refrain from running it on the ground that it stated a plain falsehood. The question of the accuracy of that ad seemed a fairly straightforward one. Driehaus had voted for Obamacare. SBA doesn't seem to have had any other vote that he might have cast in mind, other than that ...
Another term of the U.S. Supreme Court has come and gone. This year as in most years the court has issued a lot of decisions that are, in their own several ways, fascinating. One will be remembered in the history books as THE decision of this term, and it also plays into a number of my own web of obsessions. That would be NFIB v. Sebelius, also known as “the Obamacare decision.” But I’ll put off my own discussion of that one until next week. Today, I’ll do a round-up of five others of this term’s cases, ordered by the date of decision. I will also leave out of discussion an important patent law decision from this term, because I have had something to say of that one here. This leaves the following decisions as of great importance: Filarsky v. Delia (April 17) –This is an unfortunate case in which the court gave municipal immunity to a private attorney with whom the municipality contracted for a specific investigation. Generally speaking, municipalities...