Appeals Court: Judge Can't Ignore the Supreme Court to Keep Patent Cases in TX

IANAL, but I was one at one time. For what it's worth, I got a nice chuckle out of that sentence. All things considered, it's pretty condescending to be giving a district court judge a grammar lesson. But he needs one, so good for them!

Yeah, so, it's hard to detect variation from the norm if you have no basis for understanding where the baseline and range of normal variation is.

While not a lawyer, I've studied law and read lots of court rulings, and the excerpt provided is pretty high on the list of the most condescending rejections of a lower court decision I've seen.

> Sometimes they need to use a "common meaning" of a term rather than a legal one, and so they might cite a dictionary.

Citing, for the same common term, both a 1911 general-use dictionary and the 1891 first edition of Black's Law (other than for a time-specific meaning of a term in a turn-of-the-century law), on top on the “this is a noun, this is an adjective that modifies the noun” bit, is pretty much saying “English...it's a thing you might want to look into.”

The main thing isn't the tone, it's the focus. Overturning a lower court usually means talking about how a decision misapplied a test, failed to conform to precedent, enforced an unconstitutional law, or otherwise was coherent-but-wrong.

Here, the issue is that there's nothing subtle in the outcome. The ruling only mentions the relevant court decision and the dictionary citations, implying that that's all Gilstrap needed to get this right. It creates a pretty strong sense of "read the rules, idiot". The discussion of "physical is not virtual" seems especially damning, since it goes into enormous detail just to show that a 'place' is in fact a 'place', and not whatever non-corporeal entity Gilstrap wants it to be.

And, of course, it's a bit of a screw-you to Gilstrap's place in precedent. He outlined a four-part test for these suits, which is the sort of thing that becomes widely used and studied. And the appeals court struck down each branch of that test, meaning that the entire thing is now irrelevant.

Now, I would be hard pressed to describe that as something other than "pre-emptive jury tampering", but since I would also describe patent trolling as a modern protection racket, it's hard for me to really get mad about.

So there is, at least, some financial gain coming to Gilstrap's town in return for this madness.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/patent-troll-cla...

He had managed to attract 25% of all patent cases because those bringing the suites were choosing his troll-friendly court.

However, going forward, those trolls will have to go to the court where the defendant has a physical place?

A large portion of it is rural, but it does include suburban areas of Dallas like Plano, which is the HDQ for companies like JC Penney, Frito Lay, and Perot Systems. And, of course, your HDQ doesn't need to be there, just any "place of business".

The Constitution authorizes the impeachment of federal judges, but it nowhere says that they can be removed only through impeachment. Nor do the Constitution’s relevant provisions easily lend themselves to any such reading.

http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/removing-federal-judges-...