Blog of law articles

So yes, it's the first Monday in October, and this year a feisty woman judge is joining the bench and will no doubt first battle closet gender bias and clash but then fall in love with the crusty, cantankerous old coot played by Walter Matthau.

Oops, there I go again -- I meant Clarence Thomas.

So for us business litigators is there anything interesting on the Supreme Court docket?

Surprisingly, yes:

The new Supreme Court term that begins Monday will be dominated by cases concerning corporations, compensation and the financial markets that could signal the justices’ attitude toward regulatory constraints at a time of extraordinary government intervention in the economy.

The justices’ decisions will be closely watched at a time when, constitutional scholars say, Obama administration initiatives are generating fundamental questions about the structure and limits of government power that will, in short order, reach the court.

“There will be major ways in which these interventions will produce legal and constitutional issues,” said Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge who is now director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center.

The term will provide important hints, said Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University, to “how much the worst economic crisis since the Depression is going to shape the court’s general stance toward markets and economic regulation.”

Professor Pildes pointed to two cases in particular, one concerning the constitutionality of a regulatory board created in the wake of the Enron accounting scandal, the other about what role the courts should play in setting the compensation of advisers to mutual funds.

The decisions in those cases, he said, are likely to signal whether the court has become “more receptive to regulatory constraints on the market” in the wake of the financial crisis.

I think the most intriguing case deals with patent law and whether you can protect something that is purely process-oriented:

The case that has most transfixed the business community is Bilski v. Doll, No. 08-964, a patent dispute that addresses the consequential question of whether intangible business methods may be patented. A federal appeals court last year rejected Bernard L. Bilski’s attempt to patent a method of hedging risks in commodities trading, ruling that only processes tied to a particular machine or capable of transforming an object into something different can be patented.

A broad ruling could affect many aspects of the economy, notably computer software.

“Bilski seems to have the makings of a landmark decision in patent law,” said Pamela Harris, executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University.

I love how patent lawyers consider what they do interesting --talk about life in the bubble.