(06-13-2019 04:59 PM)mrbig Wrote:  I don't check the political threads in The Quad very often, as I find them unappealingly toxic. But the fact that 69/70/75, OptimisticOwl, and tanqtonic have all commented and none have expressed hatred of my idea gives me some hope. Maybe georgewebb, GoodOwl, or one of the others will drop in with a conservabomb to explode my idea.

For some reason I did not see this thread until just now. This is a great topic and I've enjoyed reading today's posts now that I've seen them.

Alas, no immediate answer springs to mind, and certainly no "conservabomb" -- but I like that word and will look for an excuse to use it some other time.

Meanwhile (as I'm sure everyone has been following with eager anticipation), the Supreme Court has recently announced merits decisions in two of the IP cases that I discussed in a CLE talk last month, and cert. decisions are expected next week in several other cases that I touched on. So far, I'm two for two in my predictions on merits rulings; we'll see if my prescience regarding cert. grants proves similar. But lest you think I am bragging, I assure you that I'm not: while the issues in these cases were esoteric in the extreme, the outcomes were pretty easy to predict from the oral argument. My "predictions" simply stated the nearly-obvious.

The Court has had merits in five IP cases this term (three before my talk and two after). The votes and opinion writers provide a nice illustration of just how non-political these IP cases have been:
9-0 Thomas
9-0 Ginsburg
9-0 Kavanaugh
6-3 Sotomayor (dissent by Breyer, Kagan and Ginsburg)*
8-1 Kagan (dissent by Gorsuch only on grounds of mootness)

*And even this case wasn't political.

I hope to generate a LinkedIn article about all of this later this month.