Tag Archives: courts

Go to Trial

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In the “legal” battle between Larry Ellison’s Paramount on the one hand and California, et al,, on the other over whether Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Brothers amounts to an anticompetitive monopoly, as California AG Rob Bonta claims, Ellison is pushing for a 4 November trial start date while Bonta and his fellow attorneys general in this case are holding out for a 5 April of next year start date.

Consider, though: Paramount, as part of the acquisition deal, agreed to pay Warner Brothers $650 million per quarter for every quarter the deal stays unclosed after 7 September this year, and a final payment of $7 billion, if the deal collapses or remains unclosed by June of next year. That’s what put the quote marks around the legal part just above.

If the defendant is ready to go to trial in early November, then that’s when the trial should start. That the defendant shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury is explicit in our Constitution for criminal cases, but the principle holds just as firmly in civil cases. California, et al., don’t get to delay the trial at government’s convenience.

Aside from that, they were ready to go to trial, tautologically, when they filed their suit. Delaying five months is nothing but an unethical effort to delay, delay, delay for the sole purpose of running up the costs to the defendant—hoping, perhaps to spend the defendant into giving up—for its impertinence in insisting on defending itself.

One More Thought on our Second Amendment

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The thought coalesced, finally, on reading a post over at Grim’s Hall, a blog I strongly recommend on GPs.

A problem I’ve had with Bruen from the start, hanging its hat on historical tradition as it does, is that the opinion, thereby, accepts as constitutionally legitimate any weapon regulation, so long as it’s been historically long-standing.

The Second Amendment carries no such caveat or exception, though. Its bar on the government is universal and unequivocal: the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. The first attempt to regulate that right should have been ruled unconstitutional. It’s not too late today.

…7th Circuit recently upheld Illinois’ ban, noting that the ubiquitous firearm from 1791 through the mid-19th century was a single-shot muzzleloader. AR-15s with large-capacity magazines, the majority said, are “a far cry from these antecedents.”

This seems to me a patently erroneous argument by the Sages of the Seventh Circuit. The Founders, along with, especially, those members of the first Congress who wrote the Second Amendment, along with the People who ratified it, were no strangers to innovation and to technological advancement. Yet no one in any of the courts that I’ve seen have addressed the premise that with that broad awareness, and against the backdrop of so many of the Continental Army’s and Navy’s large weapons systems employed in the just-concluded Revolutionary War were privately owned, the Amendment was written to be technologically agnostic.

That backdrop, those large weapon systems being privately owned, strikes me as the only valid historical tradition.

Denying Visas

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When a person, whether private or a government official, applies for a visa to come into the United States, the fact of his application clearly means he has not entered our nation; he’s still outside of it.

That brings up Chief Judge (DC District) James Boasberg’s ruling regarding the administration’s denial of visas to foreign officials and other foreign nationals considered responsible for or complicit in suppressing American free speech.

Boasberg ruled that the administration’s reason constituted viewpoint discrimination and so was a First Amendment violation of the applicants’ free speech rights. He dressed up his opinion with this:

The policy [to deny visas to those considered responsible for or complicit in suppressing American free speech], at its core, does not burden all speech about platforms, all research into content moderation, or all advocacy about online harms. It presses its enforcement thumb against one side of the scale: the view that platforms should do more to moderate content, label disinformation, restrict abuse, share data with researchers, or take responsibility for the harms their systems amplify.

The problem with Boasberg’s position is that those folks, being outside our nation, have no US constitutional (or any statutory) rights whatsoever. His argument is, thus, nothing more than a cynically offered non sequitur.

Boasberg’s rationalization is all too typical of the hysterically anti-Trump bias in his rulings.

An Alternative Extinguishment

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Federal District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín has ordered Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery to halt their merger process for two weeks—ostensibly, the judge claimed—to give States challenging the deal more time to see their case through in court. The silliness of that order is in the claim that two whole weeks is enough time for such a complex case to wend its way. Any Federal judge worthy of his black robe is well aware of the implications of such a short time frame. This is nothing more than judicial interference in a business decision.

The States’ argument also is risible. The merger would “extinguish competition” in Hollywood and reduce choices for consumers. This can be rendered irrelevant in a straightforward manner. Paramount and WB should move their operations out of Hollywood, out of California altogether. Then there would be no concern about Hollywood at all. There also would be no reduction in consumer choice from the move.

Likely locations for the two companies include Virginia, New Mexico, Texas, and Alabama, each of which has an environment favorable to making movies and television shows. Any of those environments also would lower the costs of production, which could only enhance consumer choice by making movies and TV shows easier and faster to bring off.

Celebrities and Champions

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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson apparently insists on being both.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared on the cover of the most recent issue of Essence magazine[.]

That prompted a Georgia lawyer to complain that

Supreme Court Justices are not celebrities and should not be treated like celebrities[.]

He’s right, but magazine writers are going write and magazine photographers are going to photograph. The real onus is on Supreme Court Justices to not act like celebrities.

On the other hand, Jackson enthusiastically accepts her label as “the people’s champion.”

Judges and especially Supreme Court Justices, though, cannot legitimately be the people’s champions, that’s the exclusive role of our elected officials in Congress and the White House. The role of judges and Justices is to be the champion of our Constitution and of the statutes before them, and apply both without regard to celebrity.