A Perfectly Good Morning, Ruined

I spent the morning listening to oral arguments in front of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and I am, of course, kidding about the title of the post. It was very interesting and has made me appreciate the biting wit of Jolly, the appropriately named sitting judge.

I got there early to get a good seat, as the law school told me via email that the overflow seating would be in Moot Courtroom II. I make it a point not to go into Moot Courtroom II, as it is reserved for second-rate courtroom experiences. At the risk of my only 3 readers thinking that I might started actually writing about law stuff (not gonna happen), here are the four cases I saw:

United States v. Seymore
Can any part of a financial account jointly held by a married couple can be exempt from a writ of garnishment when restitution has been awarded in a criminal case?

Ugh. Financial stuff. It makes my eyes roll in the back of my head. But the arguments presented were fairly interesting. The lower court awarded half of the account (in this case, it was stocks) to the wife of the criminal, and the government appealed to the Fifth arguing that the lower court judge abused his discretion. The defendant (Seymore) made a policy argument which was pretty convincing, saying that in order to protect her money, the woman would have had to divorce the criminal, and that the court shouldn't be willing to make divorce the only safe way to preserve financial assets. The lower court bought it, and basically said that there is equitable entitlement to a jointly-owned account even without a legal ownership right.

Prediction for the Fifth: AFFIRM. I think the Judges will affirm this one. I think the policy argument was strong enough against the Government's attempt to prove the absence of ownership interests to compel them to affirm. The only thing they might get stuck on would be the precedent of establishing an entitlement right without law to back it up. Still, its the fair thing to do, and law is all about fairness, right?

Retractable Technologies, Inc. v. Abbott Laboratories
Can an arbitration agreement be interpreted as mandatory on both parties if the contractual language in the arbitration clause says "may institute arbitration" instead of "shall" or "must"?

The best part about this case was that it was a completely semantic argument. The lower court found that the contract's "may" was ambiguous, allowing them to review the negotiations for clarification under the Parol Evidence Rule (Remember 1L year? Contract law... niiice.) The lower court saw that both parties had agreed that the "may" would imply "may", not "must", and the lower court held that the arbitration was not binding. Here, Abbott Labs argues that the "may" is not ambiguous at all and that parol evidence cannot be looked at. Instead, the court must find that the "may" means "must" under pseudo-similar caselaw from 1960.

The best part was that my boy Jolly got into it with the appellant, saying that he was trying to make "may" mean "shall" and eliminate "may" from the English language altogether. Hilarious, dog.

Prediction for the Fifth: AFFIRM. The sentiment from the panel was obvious from the questions. The judges had a hard time stomaching the argument coming from the appellant saying that there was no ambiguity. Basically, parol evidence clearly shows that the parties wanted one thing, and the appellant tried to argue that they wanted something else and that the court couldn't look at the other evidence to prove it either way. It didn't fly.

Moore v. Lightfoot, Guyton
Can a correctional officer or committee member be held legally/financially responsible for injuries sustained to an inmate due to a personal decision/decision of committee not to move inmate after a move request?

In this case, a convicted sex offender complained to an officer that his life was threatened by three other inmates and requested a transfer to another wing of the prison. The officer headed a committee to review the request, and recommended a move to another committee, which then chose to move one of the threatening inmates rather than the threatened. The plaintiff inmate was returned to general population, where he was eventually injured in a fight with one of the remaining reported inmates. Plaintiff argued that the failure of the defendants to move him after his request directly resulted in his injuries.

The lower court found that there was no immunity for the officer and held both the committee member and the officer responsible. The defendants appealed.

At first, I thought the court would eat up the qualified immunity argument. Can an officer really be held responsible for a decision his committee makes? A decision that they are supposed to make? But when the appellee started talking, it became very apparent that the officer, et al., knew the danger to the man and threw him back into general population anyway. Its hard to say that there is no responsibility for someone sworn to protect the incarcerated if you feel as though they didn't do their job reasonably.

Prediction for the Fifth: AFFIRM. The last thing said by Judge Benivides was something to the effect of "they knew the danger, they knew what would happen, and they put him back anyway? How could they not be responsible?" If you didn't think it was over before, at that point, you knew.

Southwest Bell Telephone Co. v. City of Houston, TX
Is a local ordinance that forces a telecom company to move off public land without reimbursement for manditorily shared property by competing companies discriminatory or anti-competition?

Sorry, I know that question is a convoluted one, but the case made about that much sense to me. I don't like contract stuff, and I don't like government and legislation, so I pretty much glossed over for this one. But from what I gather, Bell used public land for wires and such, and Texas law requires them to share whatever they put on public land with their competitors. But a local Houston law is forcing them to move, and the relocation costs cannot be transferred to the companies that are sharing their facilities because the contracts for that usage are already in place. So Bell is arguing that the ordinance singles out dominant companies (discrimination) and makes it hard for them to compete in the local market (anti-competition). Thats about all I can do for you; I pretty much zoned out for all the arguments and stuff. It was really boring.

I know that the lower court found for Texas and basically said that the ordinance was perfectly fine. They also dropped all the state issues and left a very narrow scope of issues for the court to look at.

Prediction for the Fifth: AFFIRM. The problem that Bell has is that most of their arguments are for the state courts, not the federal court. Most of their complaints stem from the ability of the local government to impede a contract and supercede state law. Judges Benivides and Barksdale seemed particularly unwilling to accept this case as a federal one, so it'll probably get affirmed just because the judges don't wanna deal with it coming back up again.

So that's it. That was WAAAY more information than you wanted, but I spent 3 hours in the courtroom listening to it, so you can read it for a few minutes. Geez, stop being so selfish for once. And I'm not going tomorrow so you're off the hook, but I might go Wednesday, so get the excitement train started up.