Our guest bloggers this month will be Joel Teitelbaum ’96, 2L Andrew Spillane, and Professor Erik Ugland, J.D., Ph.D., of the Marquette University College of Communication. We are grateful to our April guest bloggers, Eric Pearson and Joseph Schuster.
The Second Circuit has vacated the preliminary injunction in Salinger v. Colting, the “Coming Through the Rye” case. I have not read the opinion, but this snippet from the introduction seems significant:
We hold that the Supreme Court’s decision in eBay, Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C., 547 U.S. 388 (2006), which articulated a four-factor test as to when an injunction may issue, applies with equal force to preliminary injunctions issued on the basis of alleged copyright infringement. Therefore, although we conclude that the District Court properly determined that Salinger has a likelihood of success on the merits, we vacate the District Court’s order and remand the case to the District Court to apply the eBay standard.
More later.
It certainly used to.
Perhaps the most obvious examples are those from the early 19th century. Appointments of new justices were once tied to the creation of new circuit courts. And that was for good reason: Circuit courts were not the intermediate courts of appeals of today (with few exceptions, the most notable of which were the “Midnight Judges” that served from 1801 until 1802); they were largely nisi prius courts, functioning alongside district courts, with only limited appellate review. But they did not have their own judges. Various combinations of justices from the Supreme Court and judges from the district courts sat to form the circuit courts.
When Congress created the Seventh Circuit in 1807, therefore, which consisted of the new states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, it required that the new justice assigned to that seat hail from there. The result was Jefferson’s appointment of Thomas Todd of Kentucky.