Question: When did the author of Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly start serving on the Supreme Court?
Context: Zenith Radio Corp. v. Hazeltine Research, Inc. is the caption of several United States Supreme Court patent–related decisions, the most significant of which is a 1969 patent–antitrust and patent–misuse decision concerning the levying of patent royalties on unpatented products.  In "Zenith Radio Corp. v. Hazeltine Research, Inc.", 395 U.S. 100 (1969), the Supreme Court held that "requiring" a patent licensee to pay a percentage of its total patented and non-patented product sales as a condition of the license was misuse.  In that case, Hazeltine had required an unwilling Zenith to pay a percentage of all its sales of electronic equipment in order to be granted a license under Hazeltine's patents.  On the other hand, the Court said, if the parties adopted this method of determining royalties ("total–sales royalties") without coercion and for mutual convenience, such as because of the difficulty in making a precise accounting, then the expedient was not misuse. The "Rooker-Feldman" doctrine is a rule of civil procedure enunciated by the United States Supreme Court in two cases, "Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co.", 263 U.S. 413 (1923) and "District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman", 460 U.S. 462 (1983).  The doctrine holds that lower United States federal courts—i.e., federal courts other than the Supreme Court—should not sit in direct review of state court decisions unless Congress has specifically authorized such relief.  In short, federal courts below the Supreme Court must not become a court of appeals for state court decisions.  The state court plaintiff has to find a state court remedy, or obtain relief from the U.S. Supreme Court. Ethyl Gasoline Corp. v. United States, 309 U.S. 436 (1940), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court that limited the doctrine of the Court's 1938 decision in "General Talking Pictures Corp. v. Western Electric Co." Beginning with the 1926 decision in "United States v. General Electric Co.", the Supreme Court made a sharp distinction between (i) post-sale restraints that a patentee imposed on purchasers of a patented product and (ii) restrictions (limitations) that a patentee imposed on a licensee to manufacture a patented product: the former being illegal and unenforceable under the exhaustion doctrine while the latter were generally permissible under a lenient "rule of reason."  Thus, under the "General Talking Pictures" doctrine, a patent holder may permissibly license others to "manufacture" and then sell patented products in only a specified field (market), such as only a particular type of product made under the patent or only a particular category of customer for the patented product.  The "Ethyl" decision held, however, that a patent licensing and distribution program based on both the sale of a patented product and licenses to manufacture a related product was subject to ordinary testing under the antitrust laws, and accordingly was illegal when its effect was to "regiment" an entire industry. V.L. v. E.L., 577 U.S. ___ (2016) , is a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States concerning the adoption rights of same-sex couples.  In 2007, a Georgia Superior Court granted adoption rights to V.L., the partner of E.L., the woman who gave birth to their three children.  However, after moving back to Alabama, the couple split up.  E.L. tried to block V.L. from seeing the children, but V.L. filed a lawsuit seeking visitation and other parental rights.  On September 18, 2015, the Supreme Court of Alabama ruled that the state did not have to recognize the adoption judgment, saying that the Georgia court misapplied its own state law.  The court voided the recognition of the adoption judgment in Alabama.  V.L. petitioned the United States Supreme Court to stay the ruling during her appeal and allow her to see her children.  On December 14, 2015, the Supreme Court stayed the ruling pending their action on a petition for a writ of certiorari filed by V.L. On March 7, 2016, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed the decision of the Alabama Supreme Court by per curiam summary disposition. David Hackett Souter ( ; born September 17, 1939) is a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.  He served from October 1990 until his retirement in June 2009.  Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat vacated by William J. Brennan, Jr., Souter sat on both the Rehnquist and Roberts courts and came to vote reliably with the court's liberal members. During the tenure of Morrison Waite as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (March 4, 1874 through March 23, 1888), the Supreme Court heard an unprecedented volume and frequency of criminal cases.  In just fourteen years, the Court heard 106 criminal cases, almost as many cases as the Supreme Court had heard in the period from its creation to the appointment of Waite as Chief Justice.  Notable cases include "United States v. Cruikshank" (1875), "United States v. Reese" (1875), "Reynolds v. United States" (1878), "Wilkerson v. Utah" (1879), the "Trade-Mark Cases" (1879), "Strauder v. West Virginia" (1880), "Pace v. Alabama" (1883), "United States v. Harris" (1883), "Ex parte Crow Dog" (1883), "Hurtado v. California" (1884), "Clawson v. United States" (1885), "Yick Wo v. Hopkins" (1886), "United States v. Kagama" (1886), "Ker v. Illinois" (1886), and "Mugler v. Kansas" (1887). Hertz Corp. v. Friend, 559 U.S. 77 (2010) , was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court supported the "nerve center" test for determining corporate citizenship in the context of  /1332 § 1332  .  Hertz Corp believed that the case brought forward could not be tried in California jurisdiction and therefore hoped a case in a California court would be thrown out.  However, the state court ruled that there was California jurisdiction that was appropriate and re-established the importance of the "place of operations" test for firms.  The Supreme Court overruled but cautioned that the corporate headquarters will not be considered the principal place of business if it is not the actual center of direction, control, and coordination, such as if it were “simply an office where the corporation holds its board meetings." Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935) , was one of the cases decided by the United States Supreme Court that arose out of the trial of the Scottsboro Boys.  The Supreme Court held that the systematic exclusion of African Americans from jury service violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  The case was a significant advance in the Supreme Court's criminal procedure jurisprudence.  Building on the existing precedent of "Strauder v. West Virginia" (1880) and "Neal v. Delaware" (1882), the Supreme Court addressed an Alabama statute that was facially neutral, but held that a criminal defendant could establish a prima facie claim of discrimination by showing that a substantial number of African Americans live in a community and that African Americans have been excluded from serving on juries. Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, 531 U.S. 70 (2000), was a United States Supreme Court decision involving Florida voters during the 2000 presidential election.  In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court requested clarification from the Florida Supreme Court regarding a decision it had made.  Shortly after the Florida Supreme Court provided those clarifications, the U.S. Supreme Court resolved the election in favor of George W. Bush over Al Gore in the case of "Bush v. Gore". Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007) , was a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States involving antitrust law and civil procedure.  Authored by Justice David Souter, it established that parallel conduct, absent evidence of agreement, is insufficient to sustain an antitrust action under § 1 of the Sherman Act.  It also heightened the pleading requirement for Federal civil cases, requiring that plaintiffs include enough facts in their complaint to make it plausible—not merely possible or conceivable—that they will be able to prove facts to support their claims.  This latter change in the law has been met with a great deal of controversy in legal circles, evidenced by the dissenting opinion from Justice John Paul Stevens.
Answer: October 1990