Source: https://www.litigationandtrial.com/tags/supreme-court/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 02:44:23+00:00

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The science media has blown up recently over Sci-Hub, dubbed “the Pirate Bay of the science world.” Here’s a BigThink article, a ScienceAlert article, and an Atlantic article. Sci-Hub is, to put it mildly, the greatest open repository of scientific papers in the history of the world. There’s just a small problem: those papers are almost all copyrighted, and the whole purpose of Sci-Hub is to circumvent paying the copyright holder.
Unsurprisingly, Elsevier, the juggernaut scientific journal publisher, has sued the proprietor of Sci-Hub, neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, for running the database. Elsevier says in their complaint that they host “almost one-quarter of the world’s peer-reviewed, full-text scientific, technical and medical content,” amounting to “over 10 million copyrighted publications.” As they brag, “[m]ore than 15 million researchers, health care professionals, teachers, students, and information professionals around the globe rely on ScienceDirect as a trusted source of nearly 2,500 journals and more than 26,000 book titles” — all of whom have to pay for access, typically $35 per article.
Nearly a year ago, I praised an objection Judge Alex Kozinski filed — as a consumer, not a judge — to a proposed class action settlement that he was a part of, and so I was dismayed to see a recent article noting Judge Kozinski’s complaint that “There’s a tendency for lawyers to buy themselves off” in class actions.
He’s missing the forest for the trees: whatever the problems of class actions, the “tendency” we need to worry about isn’t that plaintiffs’ lawyers might be able to settle these cases too soon, but that the cases aren’t filed at all because they’re too hard to win, even in the face of blatantly illegal conduct.
If you’re from the Philadelphia area, you know that the tallest building in the City is the Comcast Center, begun in 2005 and completed in 2008 at a cost of $540 million. What you may not know is that Comcast’s customers paid for the whole thing (and more) by way of a glaring antitrust violation.
Between 1998 and 2002, Comcast’s share of the “Philadelphia designated marketing area” — i.e., the surrounding counties of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware* — grew from 23.9 percent to a whopping 77.8 percent. (See this brief, page 2.) In four years, Comcast went from controlling less than a quarter of the market to controlling over three-quarters of it. By 2007, Comcast still held 69.5 percent of the market.
Comcast wasn’t competing on price, and it didn’t grow that way by dramatically improving its services (I can tell you that from my personal experience!). Instead, it was buying entire cable companies within the Philadelphia area and swapping customers with other cable systems, like Time Warner. As a statistician and econometrician later established by comparing prices in the Philadelphia area to prices in comparable areas, Comcast’s anticompetitive behavior cost Philadelphia consumers a whopping $875,576,662 in inflated prices.
In December 2003, five customers and eight law firms filed an antitrust complaint against Comcast. The antitrust damages for any one customer aren’t much — probably under $1,000 for most — so the case was filed as a class action on behalf of all the customers in the area. Thus, before the case could reach the issue of whether or not Comcast actually violated antitrust laws, the case has to decide whether and how customers could bring their case as a class action.
Comcast unsurprisingly fought a war of attrition, so that the District Court didn’t get to class certification until May 3, 2007. Thereafter, the Third Circuit decided In re Hydrogen Peroxide Antitrust Litigation, 552 F.3d 305 (3d Cir. 2008), prompting the District Court to go back around to re-certify the class again on January 7, 2010. Then the case was appealed, and the Third Circuit upheld the class certification on August 23, 2011 in Behrend v. Comcast Corp., 655 F.3d 182 (3d Cir. 2011). The Supreme Court granted certiorari, and issued its opinion on March 27, 2013.
[A]s the courts become increasingly obsessed with deciding complicated cases by reference to procedural doctrines that ask the court to leave its expertise in the law and feign expertise in complex factual situations, courts run an increasing risk of becoming wholly unmoored from the facts of the disputes they are trying to decide. If a primary concern about tort litigation is that it is unpredictable — as is often stated by tort reformers — then everyone should be concerned when judges decide for themselves the dispositive facts of cases.
In early May of this year, Professor Suja Thomas had published an article in Judicature explaining how the summary judgment standard had “become a proxy for a judge’s own view of the evidence.” In one of her examples, she compared the majority and dissent opinions in Scott v. Harris, 127 S. Ct. 1769 (2007), a civil rights case involving a police chase, and just how far the majority had to leap to enter summary judgment for the defendant, preventing the plaintiff from ever presenting his case to a jury.
It’s October, which means the Supreme Court is back in session, ready to continue its pro-big-business charge. It also means it’s time for me to get back to a recurring theme on my blog: if past sessions are any indication, then no matter what the Supreme Court decides this year, it’s likely that it won’t have a clue what it’s talking about, and its opinions will be littered with dubious factual conclusions.
This problem seems to be getting worse in the era of the Roberts Court, which has taken judicial activism to a new level. Back in 2009, I recommended the Supreme Court circulate draft opinions publicly — the same way that bills are proposed in Congress and regulatory changes are proposed in agencies — before making them the law of the land. In February 2012, Alli Orr Larsen wrote about “Confronting Supreme Court Fact Finding,” perhaps by way of an agency analogous to the Congressional Research Service, which I discussed here.
But it’s important we recognize that the problem of Supreme Court “fact finding” isn’t just a matter of the Court not understanding cable television markets or how plaintiff’s lawyers are compensated differently from defense lawyers. The Supreme Court’s factual misunderstandings intrude very deeply into some of the Court’s core doctrine.
Three years ago, Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago was peddling falsehoods and misconceptions about malpractice law that wouldn’t pass a 1L Torts class. Via Walter Olson, I see he’s back with a piece titled, “The Myth of a Pro-Business SCOTUS,” claiming “Commentators inaccurately condemn the five conservative justices as corporate shills.” He specifically mentions articles by Erwin Chemerinsky, Adam Liptak, Arthur Miller (whose article I discussed previously) and the recent analysis by Lee Epstein, William Landes, and Richard Posner.
Before we go on, be sure to read my summary of the Supreme Court’s 2012–2013 Term as it affected consumers, employees, and patients. “Business” — at least big business — won over Middle America at every turn. It’s not just a matter of individuals losing the only tools they have to keep the dangers of corporate greed and recklessness in check. Small businesses, for example, were told in American Express Co. v. Italian Colors Restaurant that they can’t use antitrust laws anymore, because the Supreme Court thinks its better for big banks to reap unjust and illegal profits than it is for small businesses to have their day in court.
Back in January 2012, I posted a short item titled, Supreme Court Sets The Tone For 2012 Term: Might Makes Right, in which I recounted how the Supreme Court had begun the 2011-2012 term with two opinions that were great if you own a prison management company or fake credit repair company, but not so great if you were injured by a private prison’s malfeasance or defrauded by a consumer credit company.
The rest of that term went as expected, with opinions knocking our various discrimination plaintiffs (Hosanna-Tabor Church v. EEOC), mesothelioma victims (Kurns v. Railroad Friction Products) and workers wrongly denied overtime (Christopher v. SmithKline Beecham Corp.). There were certainly some blockbuster cases that term — like the surprise Affordable Care Act decision — but nothing earth-shattering relating to civil justice.
In 1974, spurned by the collapse of the Studebaker Corporation and the corresponding loss of pension benefits, Congress enacted the Earned Retirement Income Security Act (“ERISA”) nominally “to protect interstate commerce and the interests of participants in employee benefit plans and their beneficiaries” by ensuring the financial stability of employee benefit plans. 29 U.S.C. § 1001(b). Congress’ intentions were good — we’d all like to see pensions protected — but ERISA hasn’t accomplished much in practice. Just ask the 5,000 people who used to work at Enron, all of whom watched their $2.1 billion in retirement savings go up in smoke, or the fine employees of Hostess, which diverted pension benefits to fund its own operations, only to go bankrupt anyway.
The biggest problem is, just like in pharmaceutical and medical device lawsuits, federal preemption. It’s a one-two punch. First, ERISA “preempts” state laws (like the bad faith claims that insurance beneficiaries can typically bring against insurers who improperly deny coverage, or the breach of fiduciary duty claims investors can typically bring against financial advisors who mismanage investments), so that beneficiaries can’t bring any of the normal claims against employer-sponsored pension and health care plans. Second, ERISA’s built-in remedies are nearly worthless, and everything from investment decisions to health care benefit decisions is reviewed merely for an abuse of discretion, with the ERISA plans allowed to grant themselves the discretion to interpret their own contract language. Metropolitan Life Ins. Co. v. Glenn, 128 S. Ct. 2343 (2008). Under ERISA’s built-in remedies, for example, even when a benefit plan run by the company invests most of the plan’s money in the company’s own stock — which would normally be considered a blatant conflict of interest — the benefit plan is presumed to have acted appropriately.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously held in Millbrook v. United States that 28 U.S.C. § 2680(h) — the statute that permits lawsuits against “investigative or law enforcement officers of the United States Government” for claims arising “out of assault, battery, false imprisonment, false arrest, abuse of process, or malicious prosecution” — means just what it says, reversing nearly thirty years of law in the Third Circuit. So why did the Supreme Court have to tell us that a statute meant what it obviously meant?
Millbrook alleged he was assaulted, battered, and falsely imprisoned by three law enforcement officers of the United States. Under § 2680(h), there’s not much more to ask about the case: his claim was exactly the sort of claim Congress sought to permit when it amended the Federal Tort Claims Act in 1974 in response to a disturbing rise in “no knock” raids that destroyed homes and even killed people — without even probable cause or a warrant, as required by the Fourth Amendment. (It’s a couple years old now, but this long report from Radley Balko on the rise of paramilitary raids by domestic law enforcement is essential reading — sadly, the problem has gotten much worse in the past 40 years.) The law means, quite simply, that the United States is liable when investigative or law enforcement officers of the United States Government commit those specific intentional torts in the scope of their employment.

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