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Snarky News Commentary about Pro-Football Inc.’s Cert Petition
Hey it’s Friday! 🙂
From Above the Law, here is “Redskins Lawyers Act Like Complete Jerks, Surprising Nobody.”
An excerpt:
As Alison Frankel of Reuters reports, the Redskins’ attorneys from Biglaw heavyweights Arnold & Porter and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan wrote:
“This court relies on a robust adversarial process to fully vet questions before it,” the cert petition said. “The Team, not (The Slants), is the best suited to serve this function here.”
The ATL piece is pretty snarky, but raises a few interesting points, about which I have no intention of being snarky.
If you’ve read cert pool memos, then you might know this is a thing. Clerks will assess the quality of a brief and the name recognition or lack thereof in analyzing whether to recommend a grant. A poorly written petition in a case that is otherwise certworthy may be denied while the Court waits for the better vehicle. The kind of candor from the Supreme Court bar in a cert petition, I would have thought, seems ripe for snarky commentary. But the “Team”‘s lawyers really are among the very best.
Also, “The Slants” are doing all this for the right to be be satirical. Not so the “Team”! These are very, very different postures. And surely the Court knows this.
Finally, trying to piece together the strategy here now that there appear to be only eight Justices for the foreseeable future. The Federal Circuit ruled in favor of “The Slants”, so IF there is a 4-4 ideological split on the Court on this issue (HUGE IF), then they prevail and Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act is unenforceable in the Federal Circuit. The “Team” lost at the district court level, and who knows what was going to happen at the Fourth Circuit, so they’re trying to short circuit the “Slants”, but for what purpose? Really, there’s no help for anyone at SCOTUS if there’s a 4-4 split. Unless the “team”‘s counsel suspects there’s not really a 4-4 split! Of course. I wonder what the strategy sessions have concluded in terms of each Justice. Surely there are the four First Amendment stalwarts that signed on to Citizens United and Hobby Lobby (the Chief, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito), so which of the other four is likely to join?
Amicus Brief in Support of Shinnecock Indian Nation Land Claims Cert Petition
Pro-Football Inc. v. Blackhorse Cert Petition
Here.
Question presented:
The “disparagement clause” in § 2(a) of the Lanham Act bars the registration of a trademark that “may disparage … persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” 15 U.S.C. § 1052(a). The questions presented are:
1. Whether § 2(a)’s disparagement clause violates the First Amendment.
2. Whether § 2(a)’s disparagement clause is impermissibly vague, in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments.
3. Whether the government’s decades-long delay between registering a trademark and cancelling the registration under § 2(a)’s disparagement clause violates due process.
The Fourth Circuit matter is still pending. This is an effort to jump ahead of the process to join another petition currently pending captioned Lee v. Tam. We posted about that Federal Circuit decision here.
SCOTUS Denies Cert in Zepeda and Crow Allottees Matters
Pauma Band Cross-Petition in Gaming Compact Dispute with California
Here is the cert petition in Pauma Band of Luiseño Mission Indians of the Pauma & Yuima Reservation v. State of California:
Question presented:
One of the statutory elements for establishing a prima facie case of bad faith negotiation against a state under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 25 U.S.C. § 2701 et seq., is that “a Tribal-State compact has not been entered into.” 25 U.S.C. § 2710(d)(7)(B)(ii)(I). In this case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit interpreted this language according to the status quo ante, holding that an Indian tribe who sought and obtained a declaration rescinding a compact could not pursue a claim for latent bad faith negotiation against a state that induced the compact through material misrepresentations in order to increase its tax receipts (i.e., “revenue sharing”) by 2,460%. With this holding seeming to violate deep-rooted principles of retroactivity and interpretive norms for the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act set forth within this Court’s precedent, the question presented is:Whether an Indian tribe can pursue a bad faith negotiation claim against a state under Section 2710(d)(7)(A)(i) of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act after rescinding a compact induced by misrepresentation or other latent bad faith conduct, and thus bringing its circumstances into compliance with the statutory requirement that “a Tribal-State compact has not been entered into.”
California’s petition is here.
Gila River Indian Community Letter to NACDL re: Bryant Amicus Brief
Here:
An excerpt:
I am writing to you to express the Gila River Indian Community’s concerns regarding the Brief Amici Curiae of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and Experienced Tribal Court Litigators in Support of Respondent (“Brief’) recently filed with the Supreme Court of the United States in United States v. Bryant (No. 15-420). The Brief makes numerous attacks on the Community’s criminal justice system, hasty generalizations regarding tribal justice systems, and omits relevant facts and conclusions regarding the Community.
The stated purpose of the Brief is “to draw upon amici’s knowledge and experience with tribal-court criminal litigation to give this Court an informed perspective from which to assess these claims.” Brief at 4 (emphasis added). Unfortunately, the Brief does not do so. Instead, it reads as a narrative and anecdotal attack on tribal justice systems, prominently including the Community. These attacks on the Community’s criminal justice system have often come in a third-party form, such as letters from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and National Association of Federal Defenders to members of Congress regarding proposed legislation. Despite prominent mention of the Community, these letters- and the Brief-were not provided to the Community when sent or filed. We suspect it may have to do with the favorable outcomes to the Community in the cases discussed in the Brief.
Briefs and other materials in this case are here.
Cert Stage Briefs in Citizens Against Casino Gambling in Erie County v. Chaudhuri
Here:
Lower court materials here.
SCOTUSBlog Preview of United States v. Bryant
Here.
Fletcher Commentary on Dollar General in the Yale Law Journal Forum
Here is “Contract and (Tribal) Jurisdiction.” (PDF)
Excerpts:
Consider two commercial contracts. The first requires customers to waive their rights to bring class actions against large businesses in favor of private arbitration. The second requires a reservation leaseholder to adjudicate disputes in tribal court. Both contracts require dispute resolution in fora over which the Supreme Court does not exercise supervisory jurisdiction. Both arbitration and tribal courts are favored by acts of Congress.1 Both contracts are hotly contested in the Supreme Court. But the arbitration clause contract has been affirmed in a series of recent decisions.2 The tribal court contract, by contrast, is pending before the Court in Dollar General Corp. v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.3 Ironically, while the more conservative Justices signed on to the arbitration clause decisions, these same Justices may be Dollar General’s best bets for escaping tribal jurisdiction. This short Essay details the key arguments in Dollar General and argues that to undo the tribal contract would unnecessarily and unconstitutionally undo the right to contract for Indian nations.
And:
Justice Scalia’s death may mean a 4-4 tie in the Dollar General case. Justice Scalia was in the majority in the most recent tribal civil jurisdiction dispute, Plains Commerce Bank v. Long Family Land & Cattle Co.,32 decided by a 5-4 vote, split along the traditional conservative-liberal voting pattern. In Plains Commerce, Justice Scalia asked a nonmember company that had not specified jurisdiction in its commercial agreement with a tribal member-owned business: “[Y]our client could have obtained that certainly [sic] by inserting a choice of law provision providing that any disputes would be resolved somewhere else, couldn’t it?”33 The answer in that case from the nonmember? “I think that in the face of silence in the contract, the general rule [against tribal jurisdiction] controls rather than its exceptions.”34 There is a choice of law provision in Dollar General, negotiated at arm’s length by sophisticated business entities, and it points to tribal court jurisdiction.35
Turtle Talk 
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