United States Supreme Court

  • Fifth Amendment Protection of Cellphone Passwords Remains Murky As Supreme Court Declines to Weigh In

    When law enforcement seeks to compel a subject to provide a passcode to allow them to rummage through a cellphone, courts have not spoken with a unified voice. Some, including New Jersey's highest court, have arrived at the dubious conclusion that requiring an individual to communicate cellphone passcodes to the government does not warrant Fifth Amendment protection. Commentators had hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would reject that expansive view, however, the Supreme Court declined to wade in, seemingly guaranteeing that continued uncertainty on this critical issue will continue to bedevil criminal practitioners.

    July 01, 2021Robert J. Anello and Richard F. Albert

  • Supreme Court on APIs and Fair Use

    Google didn't get an answer from the U.S. Supreme Court on whether the Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) it copied from Sun Microsystems were copyrightable. But it got just about everything else it could have hoped for in a decision that ended its 11-year copyright clash with Sun's successor, Oracle.

    May 01, 2021Scott Graham

  • Supreme Court Leaves As Many Questions As It Answers In 'Google v. Oracle'

    The Court cleared Google of copyright infringement in terminating a 16-year long dispute as to whether Google's Android mobile platform had infringed Oracle's Java programming language's copyright. However, the Court did not answer the question of whether specific components of computer software qualifies for copyright protection at all.

    May 01, 2021Shaleen Patel

  • Not-So-Incidental Byproducts of 'Kelly'

    Early returns are in, and they indicate that the Supreme Court's decision in the so-called "Bridgegate" case will be an effective tool for pruning the wild overgrowth that has built up around the federal fraud statutes.

    January 01, 2021Gary Stein

  • Implications of a More Conservative Supreme Court for White-Collar Practitioners

    A review of recent decisions of the Roberts court and of decisions in which Barrett participated during her limited tenure on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit provides some hints regarding how the Supreme Court's future decisions may affect the law relevant to white-collar criminal practice.

    December 01, 2020Robert J. Anello and Richard F. Albert 

  • Testing for Genericness After USPTO v. Booking.com

    In the recent U.S. Supreme Court case of USPTO v. Booking.com, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the term Booking.com is not necessarily generic merely because it is composed of two components, each itself generic. In so deciding, Justice Ginsburg averred that there is an appropriate metric to determine if such a term is indeed generic, that of consumer perception.

    October 01, 2020Alex Simonson

  • Alice and Incongruity In PTAB Appeals

    This article discusses the significant contrast between consideration of issues related to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Int'l in prosecution and their resolution by the PTAB.

    October 01, 2020James W. Soong

  • Supreme Court Reins in Broad Reading of Fraud Statutes with 'Bridgegate' Case Ruling

    When federal prosecutors focus their attention on high profile misconduct that is not an obvious violation of federal criminal law, they often cannot resist the attractions of broadly worded "catch-all" fraud statutes. From time to time, however, the U.S. Supreme Court has pushed back on efforts to further expand the boundaries of these statutes, leading to reversals of some well-publicized criminal convictions.

    July 01, 2020Robert J. Anello and Richard F. Albert