from the marbury-v-maddie-hayes,-from-moonlighting dept

Court reform cannot come soon enough, because unless and until it does we cannot count on the Supreme Court to dispense justice. For many reasons, but this week brought the focus to one in particular, one we’ve long known was a problem, because we’ve seen it be once before : the Court fails to take up review of a case because too many justices had recused themselves.

Like with the previous occasion, the case this time around was also a copyright case, Vetter v. Resnick , now captioned BMG Rights v. Vetter (that’s “B” as in “Bertelsmann SE,” which owns publishers like Penguin Random House, which has book deals with several Supreme Court justices ) (can you tell where this post is going?), where the Fifth Circuit (surprise!) rendered a decision that some have credibly argued is “built on a misreading of statutory text, a misapplication of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Kirtsaeng v.…