Archive for January 18, 2012

Supreme Court Watch: Holder v. Gutierrez, Sawyers

1
1 year ago
by Michael Weiss in

Today’s Supreme Court argu­ments cover two cases simul­ta­ne­ously, pit­ting law and order against fam­ily. Both Holder v. Gutier­rez and Holder v. Sawyers involve immi­grants who arrived in the United States as minors, became law­ful per­ma­nent res­i­dents, and whom the gov­ern­ment sub­se­quently wished to deport for ille­gal activity.

But the ille­gal activ­ity is not in ques­tion here; the ques­tion is more pro­ce­dural. Specif­i­cally, peo­ple who have been law­ful per­ma­nent res­i­dents for at least five years, and have lived con­tin­u­ously in the United States for at least seven, are enti­tled to ask the gov­ern­ment for leniency when threat­ened with depor­ta­tion. Nei­ther Car­los Gutier­rez, nor Damien Sawyers, met those require­ments. (more…)

Gingrich Surge?

14
1 year ago
by Michael Weiss in

Rea­son to smile?

Today, Ras­mussen Reports pub­lished results of a poll per­formed yes­ter­day. In it, Newt Gin­grich is a mere three points behind Mitt Romney…exactly the sam­pling mar­gin of error for the poll. In other words, assum­ing there isn’t some other form of bias, the two can­di­dates are sta­tis­ti­cally tied.

To some degree, the surge is bol­stered by the CBS News/​New York Times poll, also pub­lished today, which cov­ers the past five days. That poll shows Rom­ney with a seven-​​point lead, which would make sense if the surge hap­pened after the last debate. It’s also worth not­ing that this poll cov­ers 340 reg­is­tered vot­ers, while Ras­mussen cov­ers likely voters.

On the other hand, Gallup’s poll (also pub­lished today), cov­er­ing the past four days, and includ­ing a thou­sand reg­is­tered vot­ers, indi­cates a 17-​​point lead by Romney.

One of these polls is not like the others…

What might it mean? One thing we don’t know about the CBS or Gallup polls is the dis­tri­b­u­tion of respon­dents over the var­i­ous days. If there is a late surge, a bias of respon­dents toward the ear­lier days could mask the surge some­what. The polls end­ing prior to the debate show Rom­ney with a com­fort­able lead in the neigh­bor­hood of 20 points. That the post-​​debate polls all show tight­en­ing, albeit to vary­ing degrees, sug­gests that the Gin­grich Surge might be real.

Supreme Court Watch: Maples and Golan

1
1 year ago
by Michael Weiss in

Today, the Supreme Court issued deci­sions on two cases we cov­ered earlier.

Maples v. Thomas

This was the case where a mail­room error was going to send a man to death. In a 7–2 deci­sion (Jus­tices Scalia and Thomas dis­sent­ing), the Court held in favor of Maples, the con­victed mur­derer. The deci­sion quotes from Cole­man v. Thomp­son:

Cause for a pro­ce­dural default exists where “some­thing exter­nal to the peti­tioner, some­thing that can­not fairly be attrib­uted to him[,] … ‘impeded [his] efforts to com­ply with the State’s pro­ce­dural rule.’ ”

In this case, it’s unrea­son­able to expect some­one to be aware of a court issued doc­u­ment that he never received and could not have received. The deci­sion does not, of course, ren­der Maples a free man. It merely grants him a hear­ing of his appeal.

Jus­tice Scalia’s dis­sent says, in essence, that it’s a state issue that shouldn’t be decided by a fed­eral court. He also con­cludes that, because Maples believed he was still being rep­re­sented by the firm that had aban­doned him, it should count as him actu­ally being rep­re­sented by the firm, and thus his claim of lack of rep­re­sen­ta­tion is unfounded.

Golan v. Holder

This was a some­what com­plex case involv­ing copy­right law and the Berne Convention.

The Court held in an 6–2 deci­sion (Jus­tice Kagan recused her­self; Jus­tices Breyer and Alito dis­sented) that Con­gress has the author­ity to retroac­tively take works for­merly in the pub­lic domain and place them under copy­right pro­tec­tion, and the First Amend­ment is irrel­e­vant to such actions.

The Court did not choose to speak regard­ing super­ces­sion, with respect to the rat­i­fied Berne Con­ven­tion treaty and the Con­sti­tu­tion. Rather, the Court opted to main­tain with Con­gress the power of imple­men­ta­tion of the treaty’s provisions.

Jus­tice Breyer’s dis­sent states that extend­ing such pro­tec­tion to pub­lic domain works does noth­ing to encour­age new works to be cre­ated, the osten­si­ble pur­pose of copy­right pro­tec­tion, and thus Con­gress over­stepped its bounds by grant­ing copy­right retroac­tively to pub­lic domain works.

¡No SOPA para Usted!

6
1 year ago
by Michael Weiss in

Wikipedia goes dark today, in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Ordi­nar­ily I would link to the Wikipedia arti­cle on the Act, but that would be rather coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Instead, I include here some rel­e­vant por­tions of the Wiki article.

The bill would autho­rize the U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice to seek court orders against web­sites out­side U.S. juris­dic­tion accused of infring­ing on copy­rights, or of enabling or facil­i­tat­ing copy­right infringe­ment. After deliv­er­ing a court order, the U.S. Attor­ney Gen­eral could require US-​​directed Inter­net ser­vice providers, ad net­works, and pay­ment proces­sors to sus­pend doing busi­ness with sites found to infringe on fed­eral crim­i­nal intel­lec­tual prop­erty laws. The Attor­ney Gen­eral could also bar search engines from dis­play­ing links to the sites.

On its sur­face, this seems like a rea­son­able law. If a site is vio­lat­ing copy­rights, this enables pro­tec­tion of those copy­rights by mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to access the site. But there are some rather dan­ger­ous unin­tended con­se­quences. (more…)

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