CourtArtist.com

Courtartist.com has Moved

The blog courtartist.com has moved. Please follow this link to the new and improved courtartist.

 

California Raisins and Ex Post Facto

    No opinions today on any of the big Supreme Court cases everyone has been watching and waiting for, but we did get :
    Horne v. Department of Agriculture, in which California raisin growers won the right to challenge the constitutionality of regulatory fees.......

..... and Peugh v. United States, where the Court agreed with Marvin Peugh that the longer sentence he received under U.S. Sentencing Guidelines that were revised upward after he committed his crime were an ex post facto violation.

     The Court also announce a third opinion, a class arbitration case, but I didn't finish the sketch of Justice Kagan ....she sits so far away.

 

Of Chocolate Cookies, Baseball Bats and the Amazon

In considering whether human genes may be patented the Justices of the Supreme Court searched near and far for analogies to help them grasp the complexities of bio-science. Here are a few sketches from the oral arguments along with a few choice quotes.

 Justice Sotomayor : "I can bake a chocolate chip cookie using natural ingredients - salt, flour, eggs, butter ... And if I combust those in some new way, I can get a patent on that. But I can't imagine getting a patent on the basic items ..."

 Justice Alito : "To get back to your baseball bat example, which at least I can understand better than perhaps some of this biochemistry. I suppose that in ... I don't know how many millions of years trees have been around, but in all of that time possibly someplace a branch has fallen off a tree .... into the ocean and it's been manipulated by the waves, and then something's been washed up on shore, and what do you know, it's a baseball bat."

 Justice Breyer : "... so when Captain Ferno goes to the Amazon and discovers fifty new types of plants, saps and medicines .... although that expedition was expensive, although nobody had found it before, he can't get a patent on the thing itself."

And here's a quick sketch of people lining up outside the Supreme Court in the rain Monday morning to get a seat for the arguments.

SCOTUSblog's Lyle Denniston has the argument recap here.

Supreme Court Back From Winter Break

Chief Justice Roberts stopped by the press room Tuesday morning to welcome back reporters. He said the Court would be announcing quite a few opinions, so be prepared to work through lunch.

Below are sketches of arguments the Court heard in Bowman v. Monsanto.

Monsanto sells its brand of genetically engineered soybean seed to farmers with the stipulation that they will not replant the crop seed. Indiana farmer Vernon Bowman abided by Monsanto's rules when he planted his first crop, but for a second late-season crop he decided to plant seed purchased from a grain elevator figuring much of it would seed grown from Monsanto's Rounup resistant strain. He was right, but Monsanto sued.

Bowman's lawyer, Mark Walters, had a hard time convincing Justices that once Monsanto sold its seed the patent was exhausted. "The Exhaustion Doctrine permits you to use the goods that you buy," Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. "It never permits you to make another item from the item that you bought."

Monsanto's lawyer Seth P. Waxman said the company "never would have produced what is, by now the most popular agricultural technology in America" if the patent had been so easily exhausted.

WaPo story here.

 

Is She Looking At Me ?

Justice Sotomayor often glances over at the press section during oral arguments. Is she just pondering a legal question, or checking that the sketch artist is getting this?