Toys of tomorrow 

12/14/12

By Erin Geiger Smith 

This year's must-have toys are so passé. Now, intellectual property hounds are on the trail of the best-sellers of tomorrow.

Sarah Burstein, an associate professor of law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law who tweets from @designlaw, noticed during her weekly check of new patent grants that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had given the thumbs-up to 10 designs from Lego, including a motorcycle toy. (She helpfully included the drawing with her tweet.)

Interestingly, Lego's strategy of patenting specific toy sets is a fairly new one, according to the new Legal Review, which covers legal strategy and development in the IP world. As part of its "Patents that changed the world" series, Legal Review looks into Lego's intellectual property history. In 1988, the company lost its last significant patent for its original "binding brick" system, and a number of competitors entered the fray, according to the article. Since then, Lego has acted to protect its work by focusing on the sets rather than the individual bricks.

In a similar example of copyright and childhood memories intersecting, The Morgan Library in New York has an exhibit on Peter Rabbit author Beatrix Potter and her copyright battles. According to material in the exhibit, Potter's publishers were caught off guard by Peter Rabbit's success, failed to file for a copyright in America, and Potter spent years fighting to protect her work. "One bitten, twice shy, (Potter) stoutly defended her right to other publications and related commercial products," the write-up says.

Too drunk 

12/14/12

By Caitlin Tremblay 

Today in unsurprising court rulings: Being too drunk is not an excuse to get out of paying your bar bill.

A Manhattan Supreme Court justice has dismissed a lawsuit by a patron of Larry Flynt's Hustler Club, according to the NewYork Daily News. William Ilg sued the club in 2011, claiming he shouldn't have to pay his $28,109.60 tab because he was served too many drinks and was "no longer capable of conducting financial transactions." He filed suit after seeing his credit card bill and realizing that he didn't remember much from that night. Ilg demanded a full refund from the club.

The justice threw out the lawsuit, saying the Hustler Club has no duty "to protect the plaintiff from the results of his (voluntary) intoxication." The justice also tossed a separate claim by Ilg alleging that the club didn't have a proper liquor license.

Judge judged 

12/14/12

By Dan Brillman 

The California Commission on Judicial Performance, which investigates complaints of judicial misconduct, has voted unanimously to admonish California Superior Court Judge Derek Johnson for remarks he made while sentencing a man convicted of rape, The Associated Press reports. Among other things, Johnson told the court, "I'm not a gynecologist, but I can tell you something: If someone doesn't want to have sexual intercourse, the body shuts down." He also said, "The body will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage is inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case." Instead of imposing a 16-year sentence, as recommended by the prosecutor, Johnson gave the rapist a six-year term.

During the course of the investigation by the commission, Johnson apologized for his remarks and said he had made them out of frustration with the prosecutor. In California, judges can receive four levels of punishment: advisory letters, private admonishment, public admonishment and removal or retirement from office.

Johnson's remarks come in the wake of similar comments made earlier this year during election campaign season. U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin, who was defeated in the Missouri race, said in relation to pregnancy from rape that "the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down." Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock later said that God intended every pregnancy, including those resulting from rapes. Mourdock eventually lost the seat, held by a Republican for 35 years.

Court finds CIA tortured suspect 

12/14/12

By Suhrith Parthasarathy 

The judgment makes for chilling reading. On Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that a German car salesman who was mistaken for an al Qaeda operative was "severely beaten, sodomized, shackled and hooded" by CIA agents, as the Macedonian state police looked on, The Guardian reports.

Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin, was picked up in Macedonia on New Year's Eve 2003, held in Skopje for 23 days, the Strasbourg-based court said. El-Masri was then handed over to a CIA team, which first tortured him and then transferred him to Afghanistan. In Kabul, El-Masri was locked up in a secret prison, known as the "Salt Pit," slammed into walls and kicked and beaten for four months. His head and neck were specifically targeted. In May 2004, when the CIA realized that it had the wrong man, it flew el-Masri back to Macedonia and dropped him by the side of a road near the Albanian border.

In addition to finding that the CIA had tortured el-Masri, the court found Macedonia guilty of having violated the European Convention on Human Rights' prohibition on torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. It ordered the country to pay el-Masri $78,000 in damages. In Washington, as Andrew Rosenthal writes in The New York Times, officials still haven't acknowledged the incident. A federal judge in Washington in 2006 dismissed alawsuit filed against the U.S. government by the ACLU on behalf of el-Masri. The United States has not apologized to el-Masri, although in 2005 German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had accepted that an "error" had been made, The Daily Telegraph reports.

Fewer gifts? 

12/14/12

By Erin Geiger Smith 

If general counsels are banking on buying holiday presents with their bonuses this year, they might have to trim their list a little.

A new survey of large law departments conducted by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Empsight International reveals that for participating general counsel, total pay in 2012 declined 2.2 percent due to cash bonuses that shrunk 8 percent, falling from $590,040 to $543,109.

The smaller bonuses came even as base salaries for general counsel in large law departments ticked up, rising to $567,000 this year from about $557,000 in 2011. That represents a 1.9 percent rise, notes Catherine Dunn of Corporate Counsel, who writes on the site about the survey. Participating companies included Nike Inc and Time Warner Inc, she says.

In contrast, Reuters in November covered a survey that looked at 136 general counsel from Fortune 1000 companies. They saw their total pay rise slightly, to a median of $1,548,000 in 2012 from $1,512,000 in 2011.

Early bird special 

12/14/12

By Caitlin Tremblay 

The Arizona Supreme Court has weighed in on the debate about the value of the third year of law school, approving a rule change that will allow the state's law school students to take the bar exam before they graduate. According to azcentral.com, Arizona is the only state in the country with such a provision.

The rule change was proposed recently in response to the national debate about the value of the third year of law school. Some critics say itis unnecessary,and schoolslike New York University have overhauled their curriculum to shift the emphasis to the first two years.

Usually law students graduate in May, take the bar exam in July and get their results in October. Under the new Arizona rule, students can take the test in February of their third year and get results in June, a month after they graduate.

The early testing will launch in February 2014 as a pilot program ending in 2015. It will apply to students in the state's three law schools - University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law in Tempe and the Phoenix School of Law -- who meet certain requirements, like completing 90 percent of required classes.

Changing the bench 

12/14/12

By Erin Geiger Smith 

The verdict is in: President Barack Obama will end his first term with more judicial vacancies than when it started, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. Obama had about the same record as his two immediate predecessors with court of appeals judges but fell behind both presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton when it came to getting through district judge nominations.

Taking a deep dive into the judicial nominations and confirmations in Obama's first term, visiting Brookings fellow in governance Russell Wheeler parses the reasons for the increase in vacancies. A leading one is that Obama nominated judges at a slower pace than either Bush or Clinton, Wheeler says. By the end of his third year, the president had made nominations for three-fourths of the open seats; at the same point in their presidencies, Clinton and Bush had submitted over 90 percent of their district court nominees.

Of course, nominating is the only first step, and to actually fill seats the nominees have to be confirmed. Wheeler's report shows that wait times from nomination to hearing, as well as the time it takes between the hearing and a vote, has risen steadily since the Clinton years.

If Obama continues on the same path in his second administration, he has the potential "to reshape the courts of appeals significantly in terms of the proportion of judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents," Wheeler notes. He shows how the number of Republican appointees in circuit judgeships has declined since Obama took office, and says that many Republican appointees are at or near the age in which they could take senior status -- and that could create more openings. Working through various assumptions on the possible rate of nomination and approval of judges in Obama's second term, Wheeler says the balance on the court of appeals in 2016 could be 57 Republican appointees (compared to 99 when Obama took office) and 103 Democratic appointees.

Wheeler's meticulously detailed report comes with a caveat from the man himself, who told Reuters that such predictions are less math and more "informed speculation."

Whatever the political leanings of future judges, getting robes in vacant seats would likely bring comfort to many in the overworked judiciary. It would apparently also please The New York Times editorial board, who on Wednesday suggested Obama make staffing the federal bench a top priority in his second term.

Summary Judgments for December 13

Summary Judgments for December 12

Summary Judgments for December 11

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