Skip to main content

  • McDonald's loses trademark fight against McCurry

    • U.S. fast food giant McDonald's lost an eight-year trademark battle to prevent local restaurant McCurry from using the 'Mc' prefix in a precedent-setting judgment by Malaysia's highest court.

      The Federal Court ruled Tuesday that McDonald's cannot appeal against another court's verdict that had allowed McCurry to use 'Mc' in its name. The owner says McCurry, which serves Indian food, is an abbreviation for Malaysian Chicken Curry.

    • The Appeal Court said McCurry's signboard has white and gray letters against a red background with a picture of a smiling chicken giving a double thumbs-up, in contrast to McDonald's red and yellow "M" logo. McCurry also serves only Indian food, not competing with McDonald's Western menu, the court said.

  • Boston Review — Home

    • While this has some validity, presidential buyer’s remorse is as old as the process itself and may develop even when a president nominates a lifelong ally or a well-known public figure. By the time of his nomination, Earl Warren had established himself as a dedicated conservative: he had been the attorney general and three-term Republican governor of California and Thomas Dewey’s running mate in the famously narrow loss to Harry Truman and Alben Barkley. In short, Earl Warren hardly seemed an unknown quantity when Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him as Chief Justice in 1953; and yet it was Earl Warren—the same Earl Warren who as attorney general during World War II backed the internment of Japanese citizens —who as chief justice inaugurated a liberal revolution on the court and became a champion of minority rights.
    • The conventional story also misses the fact that justices often drift slowly over their tenures—not as if they were rudderless but as if their ideological bearings changed mid-course. Despite his own personal aversion to the death penalty, Blackmun took decades to move to the left on capital punishment. Having begun his time on the bench upholding death-penalty statutes, he ended his career with one of the most stark conclusions in the Supreme Court records—a declaration in Callins v. Collins that he would “no longer tinker with the machinery of death.” Similarly, Justice David Souter, known at first as the “stealth justice” for his low profile, initially emerged as a moderate conservative; a few years into his tenure, however, his opinions took a turn leftward. This gradual shift is not uncommon. Indeed, according to Lee Epstein, justices tend to vote in accordance with the political philosophies of the presidents who appoint them during their first five to ten years on the court, but after that the correlation fades considerably.
    • 22 more annotations...

  • Editorial Observer - With the Downturn, It’s Time to Rethink the Legal Profession - NYTimes.com

    • Leading firms have historically avoided mass layoffs, concerned that their reputations would take a hit. But some have been putting those inhibitions aside, perhaps calculating that the stigma of pushing out their colleagues has faded. Law firm managers and bar associations should be looking for more creative ways to deal with the hard times — like reducing pay for both partners and associates to save jobs, as a few firms have begun doing.
    • For years, law school tuition rose along with big-firm salaries. Between 1990 and 2003, the cost of private law schools rose at nearly three times the rate of consumer prices. The average graduate now leaves with more than $80,000 in debt. In one survey, 66 percent of students said debt prevented them from considering government or public-interest jobs.

  • ADVICE AND DISSENT The New Yorker: PRINTABLES

    • ADVICE AND DISSENT
      by JEFFREY TOOBIN
      The fight over the President’s judicial nominations.
      Issue of 2003-05-26
      Posted 2003-05-19

      Ever since the Republicans took control of the Senate in January, Orrin Hatch, the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has sought to use his party’s one-vote advantage on the nineteen-member panel to speed President Bush’s judicial nominations toward confirmation. On April 10th, Hatch called for a vote on a nominee for a district-court judgeship in Arkansas. A quorum of ten is needed to call a vote, but, with all the demands on senators’ schedules, it’s difficult to keep that many together for long. The Utah Republican tried to seize the moment as soon as the required complement of his colleagues had wandered into the hearing room in the Dirksen Building. “The clerk will call the roll on J. Leon Holmes,” Hatch said, but then he noticed Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, seeking to be recognized. Hatch, who is known for his courtesy to colleagues, halted the vote and allowed the Senator to speak. He had walked into an ambush.

      Senate Democrats have displayed an uncharacteristic combativeness toward President Bush’s nominations to the federal bench. They have even launched filibusters to prevent votes on two appeals-court nominees, Priscilla Owen and Miguel Estrada. The hearing on Leon Holmes showed that the Democrats were willing to fight on lower-profile nominees, too. Feinstein said, “Let me begin, Mr. Chairman, by saying that I have never voted against a district judge, and, in reading this record and listening to the comments that this man has made, I do not see how anyone can divine from these comments that he has either the temperament or wisdom to be a judge.” In most respects, Holmes was typical of Bush’s choices for the federal bench—white, middle-aged (fifty-two years old), and very conservative. He had been a leader in the right-to-life movement in Arkansas, and had written and spoken

  • Slate Magazine

    • eleased at approximately the same time as the Abu Ghraib photographs, the first internal legal memoranda written by various high-ranking officials in the Bush administration reveal the extent to which legal methods and language have framed the discussion about what constitutes torture and to whom the new rules apply. While the public expressed outrage at the photographic evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib, the writers and architects of U.S. torture policy have been largely forgiven. Many have been promoted. There is something about bare-bones legal analysis that immunizes—even sterilizes—the contents of the message.

  • Discourse.net: Yoo, Unrepentant

    • Actually, this statement is dangerously false. The Geneva Convention does not apply to terrorists on our shores–but the Bill of Rights does. As regards foreign nationals in foreign countries where we are conducting military operations, the Geneva Conventions clearly contemplate a dichotomous world: there are foreign uniformed troops, who get POW status if caught, and there are foreign civilians, who do not, but instead benefit from certain limited protections for civilians. Irregulars who take up arms can be treated as criminals, can be tried, can be shot if there is a death penalty. POWs can’t be tried, and are entitled to a set standard of treatment that in many countries exceeds what civilian prisoners would get. Furthermore the Geneva convention system provides for a system by which military captors must hold a hearing to determine the status of a captured combatant before determining that they are not entitled to POW status. We’ve failed to do this in Afghanistan and Iraq, although we did manage somehow to do it in the first Iraq war.

  • Latest News - Leaked Torture Memo: Full Text

    • In order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign, 18 U.S.C. § 2340A (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority. Congress lacks authority under Article I to set the terms and conditions under which the President may exercise his authority as Commander-in-Chief to control the conduct of operations during a war. The President's power to detain and interrogate enemy combatants arises out of his constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief. A construction of Section 2340A that applied the provision to regulate the President's authority as Commander-in-Chief to determine the interrogation and treatment of enemy combatants would raise serious constitutional questions. Congress may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield. Accordingly, we would construe Section 2340A to avoid this constitutional difficulty, and conclude it does not apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.
1 - 20 of 1253 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page
List Comments (0)

Sponsored Links

Ads by Google