We are seeing the ultimate outcome of the 2000 judicial coup. I hope impeachment of these illegitimate justices lies in the future. Assuming the next election is not stolen, a first order of business should be to do something about a court that is no longer legitimate but is laying the groundwork for tyranny.

On April 30, the S.Ct. decided the case of KSR v. Teleflex. In their holding, they re-defined criteria for determining whether an invention is obvious. The new criteria is a throw-back to an old standard, the "flash of genius" standard. With this standard, very few inventions will be patentable. The last time US patent law was guided by the "flash of genius", the country became a technological backwater.

We are seeing the Patent Office employ this new standard and the results are not good. The impact of this new standard is that most high tech start-ups will not be able to protect their inventions. They will not be able to get investor money. They will be forced to give up their technology to big tech. Soon, there will not be start-ups at all.

This is exactly the result the Court wanted because they are in the pocket of big business. Roberts makes me want to puke.

But he LOOKS like a Supreme Court Justice. If The Supreme Justice says so, it must be correct, right?

Smile for the cameras, America. We always do the right thing.

It's not just in the United States that democracy is being undermined. It is also occurring here in Australia under the Howard government. University students organizing protests and demonstrations for the APEC summit have been under surveillance. Some students were even raided. Others have been intimidated. Still more have been offered money to spy on their fellow students who are simply exercising the right to dissent, to speak out against injustice, and join in solidarity. In other words, dissent is being criminalized just as it is under dictatorships. The so-called intelligence agencies intimidating dissenters are operating like the Stasi. We live in a society that is increasingly more and more for protecting the rich, which entails silencing those who object to this re-fashioning of democracy into an oligarchy. Our freedoms are being lost because little by little those in power (the Right) are dismantling our democratic protections and stacking our institutions with ultra-conservative ideologues. The judiciary, public broadcasting, the public service, our bureaucracy are being purged of anyone who doesn't tow the Neo-liberal or Neo-conservative line. This could never have occurred without the cooperation of an ignorant, stupid public. Habeas corpus has been suspended under the pretext that 'terrorists' (that is, anyone who doesn't kowtow to plutocrats, corporations, the USA, Republicans, or 'free' trade)are freely walking amonst us just as for McCarthy paranoids there was supposedly a 'communist' under every bed (that is, someone who wasn't right wing). Only mass demonstrations of the scale seen in the 1930's and 1960's could this madness be circumvented. But will the herd stop being led by the nose?

Good interpretation of the Supremes' cases, Mr. Epps. And this is spot-on with the majority's attitude...

That is, if the speaker is rich and influential, then free speech wins. If not, free speech loses.

That's entirely in line with the GOP's conception of liberty in this country. Forget any absolute, broadly-applied standards. No, they're about liberty on a sliding scale -- available for those able to afford it; the most liberty at the top, and then almost none at the bottom. To them, meaningful speech should only be free if you can pay for the privilege of it. It's un-American, but it's where their hard little hearts reside.

And it's interesting to see their ideological microtome being used to wittle away liberal precedent, bit by bit. Interesting, and horrifying. This court disgraced itself in 2000; I think we're going to see a long parade of rotten precedents established by them.

A much bigger part of the conservative movement in the courts is in economic law, particularly antitrust law, the bane of seriously big business. And yesterday a venerable precedent prohibiting resale price maintenance, holding RPM automatically illegal, was swept away after 96 years, to be replaced by a rule-or-reason test that will inevitably mean that no RPM is found illegal. They did not even do the reasonable thing as establish a rebuttable presumption that an RPM arrangement is illegal -- no they went the whole hog.

RPM refers to agreements, arrangements, activities, or practices between supplier and dealer/retailer to establish a minimum price or price level to be observed by the dealer when reselling a products or services to customers. RPM can be achieved directly or indirectly. RPM arrangements and activities are almost always regarded as serious violations of competition and antitrust law.

This is a huge change in US economic law, one that will slowly cost every ordinary American dear as companies slowly force up prices through the distribution channel. It really is a gift for big companies and big retailers, and it runs contrary to the rest of world competition law, where RPM is automatically illegal.

What drives me nuts is that we are so obsessed with the idea that the conservative agenda is just abortion, civil rights and free speech. In reality, the things that are having the biggest impact are the economic decisions, the gutting of securities laws, the emasculation of antitrust, the shear taste of Roberts et al for removing the pesky laws that so troubled the Wall Streeters who employed him and his buddies in private practice.

I am a firm believer in law and economics, but I do not believe the Chicago School anymore -- they have sold out their intellectual integrity years ago, to ponder to people who will pay them for expensive economic rationalizations of breathtaking absurdity -- so much so that in internal legal jargon the slang for the consultant economists is "the whores" as in "has anyone told the whores what to write yet" -- but you know what, the judges, who must know better, buy this crap.

The US legal system is slowly shedding every piece of law designed to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the weak.

And by the way, mostly I work for the rich and powerful, and I still don't agree with shredding the rules. I suppose it is fair to say that it is not in my economic interest, since if there is no trouble to get into, the rich and powerful will not pay me to get them out of it.