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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 theres 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 Tams 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. Tams 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 wouldve 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 theyre about making money, because after all, the business of America is business. ... It wasnt a pretty opinion. Professor Crouch said of the opinion that the Courts logic is largely incomprehensible.
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 theres 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 Tams 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. Tams 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 wouldve 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 theyre about making money, because after all, the business of America is business. ... It wasnt a pretty opinion. Professor Crouch said of the opinion that the Courts 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
unblock
(51,974 posts)1. "If only those wrongfully convicted death row prisoners could find a pecuniary justification ...
.. 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.