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Patent Loving Judge Keeps Pissing Off Patent Appeals Court, Doesn't Seem to Care
- phendrenad2 6y agoWasn't this guy's son also a judge, and together they're building a little patent troll servicing family empire? Or am I thinking of another sketchy Texas judge?
- parhamn 6y agoI’m really curious about this or other cases of overt corruption by federal judges. I, clearly wrongly, assumed that most of their “bad” behavior was over their judicial philosophy or desire to pontificate. There are family empires around them?
- nitrogen 6y agoNot directly related to patents, but on the subject of judicial corruption IIRC there have been cases of judges directly colluding with youth correctional facilities to send as many kids as possible, or with estate lawyers to get elderly declared incompetent so their assets could be taken.
- fitblipper 6y agoThat is horrifying. source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html
- cafard 6y agoThat was near Scranton, Pennsylvania, about fifteen years ago. As far as I recall there was a county or municipal judge who was doing the sentencing.
- fitblipper 6y agoAsylum law is federally defined. However, if you look at the asylum requests per judge [1] you can see 2 different judges, 1. Hear 354 cases and approve 3.7% and 2. Hear 770 cases and approve 97.4% in my opinion clearly shows judges have a HUGE amount of discretion in how to apply the law and makes it easy to see how corruption could sneak into the system without being quickly identified and rooted out. There is a de facto qualified immunity for judges. [1] https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/judge2019/denialrates.html https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/judge2019/denialrat...
- plouffy 6y agoAccording to https://www.ali.org/members/member/459016/ https://www.ali.org/members/member/459016/ he has 2 sons who are in high school. So unlikely that this is the judge you’re thinking of.
- phendrenad2 6y agoCorrection: I was thinking about a family of patent lawyers.
- avmich 6y agoImpeachment as a mechanism doesn't seem to be nearly as robust as necessary. We need to strengthen it; otherwise we're going to be at the mercy of whoever reached the post which is not involuntarily removable. We have missing checks and balances there in the system.
- bsder 6y agoI thought this got fixed and that you can't just randomly wind up in West Texas anymore? Thus all the "request to transfer venue" filings. Presumably, these are the last of the cases and that judge is trying to extract the last bits of money he can get away with?
- olliej 6y agoCorrect, but that depends on the judge obeying the law, which he isn’t. He’s denying or delaying every request while forcing discovery in the intervening time to force the victims to settle. Until trolls have to put up non-trivial bond to cover discovery costs there is no reason for them to stop, and petty corrupt judges like this will continue to profiteer from it
- ikerdanzel 6y agoMaybe the old ways of threathening and assassinations might motivate these judges to behave.
- heyoni 6y agoHow does this judge profit from this?
- hagbarddenstore 6y agoMoney under the table.
- fergie 6y agoWhat is the judge's motivation here? Why try to attract patent issues to your own court? What do you gain?
- hagbarddenstore 6y agoMoney under the table.
- _rpd 6y agoThere's a political aspect. The judge has a real impact supporting a pro intellectual property agenda. Texas is famous for its interpretation of property rights, upon which many oil and gas fortunes were founded. There seems to be a faction that supports similar interpretations for intellectual property rights - perhaps with the hope of founding similar fortunes?
- ping_pong 6y agoIs there no accountability? He can't be fired or brought in front of some sort of board and get removed from the bench? It really seems obvious he is abusing the system here, are they just going to let him get away with it so blatantly?
- throwaway81523 6y agoIANAL but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writ_of_prohibition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writ_of_prohibition might be what you want. Basically once enough evidence has piled up that the guy isn't adjudicating patent cases neutrally, you can ask the circuit court to mandate his recusal from such cases.