Yup. This was the guy who learned Java because he felt he needed to know how to program to be qualified to make a ruling in Oracle v Google. I usually dislike criticizing or praising individual judges (unlike politicians, it's not for the public to pick and choose -- nor should it be), but this one is really remarkable.
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In one episode, Oracle's star lawyer... was arguing that Google copied the nine lines of rangeCheck code to accelerate development to gain faster entry into the mobile phone market.
Alsup told Boies, "I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America --how could you even make that kind of argument?"
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57445082-94/judge-william-a...
Never argue with Hacker Judge.
Got to admire his willingness to learn and his ability to recognize when he needs to learn something before ruling.
Not that we really need labels like that.
As for the result, it's nice to see. I'm hoping for more transparency, but if the past year hasn't kicked the government into gear I'm not sure what will (short of the courts, I suppose).
With his name on so many high profile cases recently, I'm hoping he'll make it into Supreme Court.
And they say that the universe is random chaos!
The most charitable thing you can say about it: it's not been disproven as of yet.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9664000/9664697....
Well, if you're committed to the idea that it must be true, I guess it hasn't been disproven... but it's been very, very severely discredited...
See e.g. http://andrewgelman.com/2014/01/10/look-whos-3-years-date-wh...
In most western democracies (and certainly in Westminster-style democracies, which I know best) the judges are bound by a certain set of rules that limit how activist they can be: specifically, a constitution. They're required to make findings of law, nor findings of morality, so they can't just manufacture law or destroy law as they see fit: they need a different law they can point to which overrules the one in question. Hence the US Constitution, which acts as the highest law in the land. A judge will always reference their decision, in the end, to an established law (or the constitution).
Conversely, elected officials are empowered to _make_ law. Less true in the US (where the constitution binds the hands of the legislature and executive), but very true in Westminster systems where parliament is the supreme authority.
Source (PDF): http://www.nycbar.org/pdf/report/become_a_judge.pdf
- Judicial recall certainly imposes accountability, even on unelected judges. Election, in fact, doesn't impose accountability anywhere; only re-election would do that.