Microsoft Wins Xbox Class-Action Fight at US Supreme Court (reuters.com) 26
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of Microsoft in its bid to fend off class action claims by Xbox 360 owners who said the popular videogame console gouges discs because of a design defect. From a report: The court, in a 8-0 ruling, overturned a 2015 decision by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed console owners to appeal the dismissal of their class action lawsuit by a federal judge in Seattle in 2012. Typically parties cannot appeal a class certification ruling until the entire case has reached a conclusion. But the 9th Circuit allowed the console owners to voluntarily dismiss their lawsuit so they could immediately appeal the denial of a class certification. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing on behalf of the court, said such a move was not permitted because a voluntary dismissal of a lawsuit is not a final decision and thus cannot be appealed. The approach sought by the plaintiffs would undermine litigation rules "designed to guard against piecemeal appeals," Ginsburg wrote.
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Anyone else notice how the headline is "MICROSOFT WINS AGAIN!" and even the summary is "we have rules for a reason, and the reasons here are particularly-important so people don't just keep fucking you and then pulling out just after you scream rape each time"?
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Re:9th Circuit gets slapped down...again (Score:5, Informative)
Politifact claims it's the 6th, 11th, then 9th [politifact.com].
Findlaw also says it's the 6th [findlaw.com].
In 2015 [scotusblog.com] it looks like it was the 11th, and in 2014 [amazonaws.com] it looks like the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 10th and 11th came ahead of the 9th in reversals.
But Fox news agrees with you [foxnews.com], even though the year they select, 2012 [scotusblog.com], it was not the most overturned, with the 1st, 6th, 8th, and 11th having more (the 9th was tied with the 5th).
I'm not sure how this counts as tap dancing...
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9th Circuit is the most reversed circuit of the 11 existing circuits. There's no tap dancing around that one.
Only if you care to cherry pick numbers and time frames from that Politifact article. "The 9th Circuit's reversal rate is higher than average, but it's not the absolute highest among the circuit courts. That distinction goes to the 6th Circuit, which serves Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, with an 87 percent average between 2010-15. The 9th Circuit is in third place." and "We also found that the 9th Circuit never had the highest reversal rate in any individual term between 2004-15. (That's the farth
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Well, that quote is accurate, but requires further explanation. When we say "lower court was simply incorrect", the use of the passive voice doesn't indicate what was incorrect. For what is described, what is incorrect is not the binary decision of whether the plaintiff or defendant should prevail, but rather some point of law that was used to make that decision. For example, in the recent Texas death-row case [ncronline.org], the Supreme court found that the appeals court didn't use the correct criteria in their judgement
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The 9th Circus court is the perfect example of progressive politicians legislating from the bench. They interpret the law to say what they think it should say instead of interpreting it as it is written. Just more of "the end justifies the means." The result is all that matters, to hell with the law. You know, when SCOTUS is unanimous including Sotomayer and Ginsburg that you are way the hell out in left field.
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Here's some facts we can all argue about. It's more fun that way.
"
The 9th Circuit’s reversal rate is higher than average, but it’s not the absolute highest among the circuit courts. That distinction goes to the 6th Circuit, which serves Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, with an 87 percent average between 2010-15. The 9th Circuit is in third place.
6th Circuit - 87 percent;
11th Circuit - 85 percent;
9th Ci
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You'd think they were out of the mainstream of jurisprudence, judging by how often that happens.
It is not nearly so clear cut as that. The huge majority of all cases decided by any appeals court never make it to the Supreme Court, so if you look at the likelihood of any given ruling being reversed by the Supreme court, it is on the order of 0.1%.
And the 9th Circuit is the biggest circuit, so if you talk in absolute numbers it will have the most ruling reviewed and overturned, just because it hears the most cases.
Depending on how you do the math and what period you analyze, the 9th Circuit is not even
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Re:Convoluted law system (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't understand this summary at all.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing for Microsoft?
If I parsed it right.
A) Console owners got themselves a class action lawsuit.
B) In 2012 a federal judge dismissed the class action lawsuit
B2) They would then have to wait until the rest of the process (whatever that is, it doesn't say, maybe individual (non class) lawsuits) complete.
C) But then the 9th circuit said "We'll let you dismiss that suit you brought, so it's ended, so you can appeal the dismissal of the class certification".
D) The supremes, but not including Diana Ross said "You can't do that. That's cheating". You have to wait while paying large sums to lawyers.
Lesson: If your product breaks due to a design defect, wear the plaintiffs down with process.
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B> The judge didn't dismiss the lawsuit - the judge agreed with Microsoft that it couldn't be a class action - but let the all the individual suits continue. Therefore the plaintiffs couldn't sue to get their class action status restored until their individual cases were heard. Microsoft's point was that it can't be a class action case because less than 1% of the XBox' sold have people making these complaints therefore it can't be a design defect per se. (
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That's a lot more coherent. Thanks.
Re: And a Pakistani gets a death sentence for FB p (Score:2)
The existence of a greater wrong doesn't negate the harm of a lesser wrong.
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True, but a greater wrong's existence does inform the optimal allocation of a given set of resources toward correcting wrongs. See the "scarce resources" exception to the "not as bad as" fallacy [rationalwiki.org].