Patent Loving Judge Keeps Pissing Off Patent Appeals Court, Doesn't Seem to Care | Hacker News Reader

Patent Loving Judge Keeps Pissing Off Patent Appeals Court, Doesn't Seem to Care

techdirt.com

98 pointselliekelly19 comments

Wasn'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?

I’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?

Not 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.

That is horrifying.

source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html

That 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.

Asylum 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/denialrat...

According to 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.

Correction: I was thinking about a family of patent lawyers.

Impeachment 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.

What is the judge's motivation here? Why try to attract patent issues to your own court? What do you gain?

Money under the table.

There'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?

I 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?

Correct, 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

Maybe the old ways of threathening and assassinations might motivate these judges to behave.

How does this judge profit from this?

Money under the table.

Is 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?

IANAL but

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com