Wednesday round-up

CONOR MCEVILY MAY 15, 2013 10:48 AM

Coverage of Monday’s orders and decisions continued to trickle in yesterday.

At this blog, Ronald Mann reports on Monday’s decision in Bowman v. Monsanto Co., in which the Court held that the doctrine of patent exhaustion does not allow a farmer to reproduce patented seeds through planting and harvesting without the patent holder’s permission. Jaclyn Belczyk of JURIST also covers the opinion, while Erin Geiger Smith of Thomson Reuters reports that, “[f]or many intellectual property lawyers focused on technology, the most important part of [the decision] was that the court limited its holding to the facts before it and did not go wider.”

Also for this blog, Ronald Mann analyzes Monday’s opinion in Bullock v. BankChampaign, N.A., in which the Court held that the term “defalcation” in the Bankruptcy Code includes a culpable state of mind requirement involving knowledge of, or gross negligence in respect to, the improper nature of the fiduciary behavior.  Lawrence Hurley of Reuters and Jaclyn Belczyk of JURIST also cover the decision.  In other coverage for JURIST, Belczyk reports on Monday’s decision in Dan’s City Used Cars, Inc. v. Pelkey, holding that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994 does not preempt state-law claims relating to the storage and disposal of a towed vehicle, as well as the Court’s cert. grant in Burnside v. Walters, in which the Court will consider whether the in forma pauperis statute prohibits indigent plaintiffs from amending their complaints.

Briefly:

• Adam Liptak of The New York Times reports on the cert. petition recently filed in Scott v. St. John’s Church in the Wilderness, asking the Court to review a decision by the Colorado Court of Appeals upholding an injunction against the display of “gruesome images” in places where children might see them.
• Richard Wolf of USA Today observes that with the three unanimous decisions issued on Monday, the Court has “now reached unanimous decisions in nearly 60% of the case decided this term – a loftier rate of agreement than in recent years.”
• At Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger links to a report in the San Jose Mercury-News (which Cormac covered in yesterday’s round-up) on California’s filing of a notice of appeal indicating that it will ask the Court to review an order requiring California to decrease its prison population.
• At Thomson Reuters, Lawrence Hurley reports that on Monday Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Alito served as judges in a mock trial at the Shakespeare Theatre based on Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus.
• In this blog’s “SCOTUS for law students” column, Stephen Wermiel discusses Justice O’Connor’s recent remarks expressing doubts about the Court’s decision to grant cert. in Bush v. Gore, as well as expressions of regret by other Justices.
• John Elwood reviews the relisted cases from Monday’s order list at this blog’s “Relist watch” feature.
• Erin Fuchs of Business Insider notes that “[t]he so-called ‘breast cancer’ gene that spurred Angelina Jolie to get a preventative double mastectomy” is also at the center of the patent dispute in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics.

[Disclosure:  The law firm of Goldstein & Russell, P.C., then known as Thomas C. Goldstein, P.C., was among the counsel to the respondents in Bush v. Gore.]

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