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mahatmakanejeeves

(56,897 posts)
Tue Jun 20, 2017, 10:51 AM Jun 2017

Above The Law: Supreme Court Confirms The Bill Of Rights Is Just About Making Money

Supreme Court Confirms The Bill Of Rights Is Just About Making Money, Strikes Down Trademark Disparagement Provision

It's not that the decision is wrong, it's that the reasoning is just a cynical lie.

By JOE PATRICE
Jun 19, 2017 at 1:11 PM

When the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United, most people decried the end of campaign finance reform or rejoiced at all the “Obama is a criminal” ads they could buy with the backing of kooky billionaires. But the decision also erected a signpost marking the path that most defines the Roberts Court: the provisions of the Bill of Rights are for making money. That “corporations are people” has reached the point of cliché, but there’s a reason Roberts started issuing all his oaths of office on a dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged when no one was looking.

So when Simon Tam’s case reached the Supreme Court, we all knew what was going to happen. Tam, a member of an all Asian-American band called “The Slants,” challenged 15 U. S. C. §1052(a), which sets standards for trademark protection to bar marks that “disparage… or bring… into contemp{t} or disrepute” any “persons, living or dead.” Tam’s group believes their use of a known slur against Asians and those of Asian descent is an act of reclamation and not one of disparagement.

An interesting factual challenge would’ve considered — “Brandeis Brief” style — the expanding body of academic work on the nature of linguistic reclamation and delve into whether the facile neutrality imposed upon words like “disparage” in the application of the statute improperly excluded valuable expressions from the financial protection provided by a federal grant of intellectual property protection. That would have been a fascinating dive into the changing meaning of language and the problems inherent in interpreting terms in legal texts from a cemented perspective of whiteness.

As would someone just pointing out that the statute is unconstitutionally vague — which is the right answer! — and calling it a day. But the Court decided to drop an ode to how fundamental rights really only matter as long as they’re about making money, because after all, the business of America is business. ... It wasn’t a pretty opinion. Professor Crouch said of the opinion that the Court’s “logic is largely incomprehensible.
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Above The Law: Supreme Court Confirms The Bill Of Rights Is Just About Making Money (Original Post) mahatmakanejeeves Jun 2017 OP
"If only those wrongfully convicted death row prisoners could find a pecuniary justification ... unblock Jun 2017 #1

unblock

(51,974 posts)
1. "If only those wrongfully convicted death row prisoners could find a pecuniary justification ...
Tue Jun 20, 2017, 11:14 AM
Jun 2017

.. for staying alive."


ouch! that's gonna leave a mark!


yeah, it's pretty nuts to say that the first amendment requires the government to grant a property right interest in a racial slur to the first person to register it and then enforce those rights by requiring anyone else trying to profit off that same racial slur to pay that first person.

of course there's clearly *more* free speech in the absence of such property rights, just not so much the ability to profit from it, or rather, the ability to prevent others from profiting similarly off of it.

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