Archive | December, 2004

As part of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update tonight, Tina Fey did a bit in which she recalled some of the misconduct that Andrea Mackris accused Bill O’Reilly of committing. Fey ended by saying, “Don’t Forget That Bill O’Reilly is Disgusting,” with the screen filled with a title with those words. Although it might have […]

There’s a RealPlayer recording of a debate on this subject, between Richard Epstein and Eben Moglen, here, and a post here. The debate was sponsored by the Columbia Law School Federalist Society.

Slashdot links to a press release announcing a new trademark lawsuit:   The American Chemical Society filed a complaint on Dec. 9 against Google Inc. in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The complaint contends that Google’s use of the trademark “Scholar” for its Google Scholar literature-search engine constitutes trademark infringement and unfair competition.  A […]

Rutgers-Camden Law School and the Constitution Center are organizing a very interesting sounding conference on this subject. It’s inspired by University of Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone’s recently published book, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (Norton, 2004), and it will include many noted experts, including Federal Third Circuit Judge Michael Chertoff and First Amendment […]

Brian Leiter, who knows a few things about rankings, describes the Legal Affairs Top 20 Legal Thinkers poll as a “meaningless publicity stunt”: The list of candidates is–to put the matter gently–absurd, not because there aren’t substantial “legal thinkers” on the list (there are some), but because there are far too many on the list […]

The Law.com newswire just to the right of this post on the VC page has a story about Betcom.com’s odds on the next Supreme Court Justice. The actual odds are posted on Betcom.com here. Current favorites are Fourth Circuit Judges Luttig and Wilkinson. According to the Law.com story, however, the betting lines will not adjust […]

Stuart Buck raises some questions about puzzling inclusions and exclusions from the Legal Affairs Top 20 list voting.

A new entrepreneurial venture from some scholars of entrepreneurship. The BizFems Speak! blog is no more, but the chief BizFem Christine Hurt of Marquette Law School has moved over to team up with Gordon Smith of the University of Wisconsin Law School at the Conglomerate. They describe their founding: Welcome to the new Conglomerate blog […]

Jonathan Chait wrote a rather dismissive LAT column on why there are so few conservatives in academia. Stephen Bainbridge, who has a rather different (and more accurate — but not just because he agrees with me) assessment from within the academy, takes Chait to task for “peddling shopworn lies.” Specifically, Bainbridge notes that neither of […]

A judge criticized by Bill O’Reilly responded: It was the third time that O’Reilly has attacked the judge on TV. Months ago, O’Reilly vowed to make sure Rapkin was not re-elected — when Rapkin announced he was retiring at the end of this year, O’Reilly took some of the credit. Wednesday night’s salvo was over […]

I was surprised (and delighted) to see that the Washington Times today heavily discusses Wine Wars in a house editorial on the wine cases. They correctly summarize my argument: But as Todd Zywicki, a George Mason Law School professor, points out in “Wine Wars: The 21st Amendment and Discriminatory Bans to Direct Shipment of Wine,” […]

Marty Lederman reports that Chief Justice Rehnquist plans to administer the oath of office to President Bush on Inauguration Day.

My colleague Neil Netanel reports that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Grokster case, and will thus again consider when the distributors of a product can be held liable on the ground that the predominant uses of the product are copyright infringement. (The last time the court considered this was in Sony v. […]

The New York law Journal reports:   The explosion at a Long Island Railroad station that injured Helen Palsgraf not only made her family name a household word — at least in households with lawyers — it also began what some of her descendants call a curse.  In the eight decades since the New York Court of […]

The Associated Press reports that this week the Senate approved by voice vote a new privacy law, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, that the President is expected to sign shortly. The law basically prohibits intentionally taking a picture of someone naked or in their underwear, without their consent, if at that time the person reasonably […]