Posted on 01/18/2006 12:23:56 PM PST by 2Jim_Brown
CHICAGO, Jan. 18 (UPI) -- Judge Samuel Alito seems destined to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the Supreme Court of the United States in the coming weeks and will likely be faced with an assortment of major technology cases as a new justice, but legal experts tell UPI's The Web that as an appeals-court judge for the last 15 years his experience with technology cases has been quite limited.
Alito has been an appeals-court judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in New Jersey and has heard one major copyright case and a number of contract cases involving technology companies like Nextel, but he has had no experience with patent cases, experts said. By Gene Koprowski
(Excerpt) Read more at upi.com ...
How many assisted suicide cases?
Meaningless blather from UPI
There's usually nothing different about a "technology" case as far as the law is concerned. That is unless you're an activist Judge that rewrites law from the bench.
Well, not quite meaningless. Nominee Robert Bork, for example, was reported at the time as being particularly strong in antitrust law, IIRC. This does not mean that he couldn't decide the cases in other areas, but in that particular area he was claimed to be a recognized expert. Something similar could be said about nominee Samuel Alito -I understand their blather as meaning that patent law is not his strongest suit.
Not really. Too many judges get loony when faced with technology. They don't realize you just apply current law to the 'net, instead treating it as new territory. It's already taken a while for freedom of speech on the 'net to get close to the protections regular speech gets. For example, anonymous speech is protected the old way, but is still iffy online due to judges who don't understand. Also think of the DeCSS case, where publishing a listing of program code was deemed to be illegal. I'd think that was freedom of speech, but it was found not to be.
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