Our Faculty in the Media

March 26, 2012
U.S.A. Today
...today the Supreme Court begins three days of historic oral arguments on a 2010 health care law that has become a symbol of the nation’s deep political divide. Before one word has been spoken in court, the case has been likened to its review of the income tax system in 1895, the Social Security Act in 1937 and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964-65. “It’s an incredible case study about the role of the court,” says Bradley Joondeph, a law professor at Santa Clara University who has monitored the health care lawsuits. “When do the justices feel it’s their role to step in and essentially overrule the judgment of the political process?”

March 24, 2012
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Doctors are not used to public criticism,” said Eric Goldman, an associate professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law in California, who tracks such lawsuits (by doctors who have gone to court to fight online critics), “So it’s a new phenomenon for them.” While such cases are rare, Goldman said, they’ve been popping up around the country as patient review sites such as vitals.com and rateyourdoctor.com have flourished. Defamation suits are “kind of the nuclear option,” Goldman said. “It’s the thing that you go to when everything else has failed.”

March 13, 2012
San Jose Mercury News
Yahoo filed a federal patent lawsuit against Facebook on Monday, in a sign the recent wave of big-money licensing disputes in the wireless sector may be spilling into other segments of the tech industry. The lawsuit comes after Yahoo confronted Facebook last month with a demand that the so-cial networking giant pay royalties for using Web technology that Yahoo says it invented...But with big money at stake, an increasing variety of tech companies may be exploring new ways of making money from their intellectual property, according to Colleen Chien, a patent expert and assistant professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. “These discussions are happening now,” she said.

February 24, 2012
San Jose Mercury News
The Chinese company suing Apple over the use of the iPad trademark in China has brought its fight to Silicon Valley, filing a lawsuit in Santa Clara County Superior Court that seeks to ban Apple from also using the iPad name in the European Union and other parts of Asia, including South Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam. Observers see the legal move as another attempt to get the Cupertino company to settle out of court its increasingly bitter battle with Proview, a Chinese computer display company in bankruptcy proceedings and in dire need of cash. “Proview is being incredibly aggressive,” said Anna Han, a legal specialist in international business transactions and technology licensing at Santa Clara University. “They are desperate. They are in bankruptcy and they have nothing to lose.”

February 8, 2012
Contra Costa Times
...American Legion leaders are rallying military veterans to convince California voters they should require police to enforce federal immigration law. They call it the Protection Against Transnational Gangs Act and say it may block Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Francisco counties from refusing to hold some immigrant inmates for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Most immigrants living in the U.S. illegally are neither gang members nor criminals and to call the immigration initiative an anti-gang measure may confuse voters about what it would actually do, said Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a Santa Clara University law school professor. “It’s a very shrewd move. Who doesn’t want there to be less gang activity?” Gulasekaram said. The added enforcement would cost millions of dollars annually, according to the state’s independent analysis. It will be a tough sell even if the measure makes the ballot, Gulasekaram said. “This sort of stuff tends to get passed only when you have the right partisan conditions, when you have a Republican-dominated electorate and a Republican-dominated Legislature, which we don't have in California.”

February 7, 2012
ABC News
A federal appeals court in California today struck down Proposition 8, the controversial ballot measure passed in 2008 that defines marriage as between a man and a woman. “The court said it didn’t need to rule on whether there is a fundamental right to marry of same sex couples, nor did they need to address the question of whether a state could ever outlaw a marriage between same-sex couples,” Margaret Russell of the Santa Clara University School of Law said. “Instead, the court said that same-sex couples already had the right to marry before Proposition 8, as well as the protections of the 2003 domestic partner law and therefore could not be denied.”

January 31, 2012
Market Watch
The impending initial public offering of Facebook, the world's largest social network, is the talk of Silicon Valley. Some even believe that the deal—which even with reports of a scaled-back valuation of below $100 billion—would be one of the largest tech IPOs to date and could rival the 1995 offering of Netscape in importance. “This is clearly the most important moment in the Valley’s history since the Netscape IPO,” said Stephen Diamond, associate professor of law at Santa Clara University. “The Netscape IPO put the Valley on the map in a different sort of way. Post-Netscape, it was not just a silicon, hardware world.” The IPO of the first Internet browser ushered in the Internet era and fueled the ensuing dot-com boom.

January 23, 2012
San Jose Mercury News
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday limited law enforcement’s ability to track suspects with GPS devices, but it left the door wide open for legal wrangling in California and elsewhere over how far the government can go with new technologies to snoop on the whereabouts of its targets. But because Scalia and four other justices took a narrow approach to the case, the decision leaves broader unresolved questions about the trade-off between law enforcement and citizens’ privacy rights. In particular, the court did not determine whether police can track citizens using location devices they already possess, such as cellphones or in-car GPS systems. Kyle Graham, a Santa Clara University law professor, said courts will now have to sort out the limits on “reasonable” police use of GPS tracking to ensure that even with a warrant it doesn't allow “unfettered monitoring of suspects’ movements.”

January 21, 2012
Washington Post
The FBI’s action (shutdown of the popular file-sharing site Megaupload.com) raises many questions about who oversees copyright on the Web and how far the government can go. Web organizations questioned whether the government has the right to shut sites down for hosting pirated content, as it did in the case of Megaupload, without allowing companies to defend themselves in court first. “They will wonder if they have done anything different from Megaupload, and does that mean the Feds will come through their door,” said Eric Goldman, a professor of intellectual property law at Santa Clara University. “Keep in mind the DOJ's indictment is actually a sales document; it is their interpretation of things, and they are throwing spaghetti on the wall with their claims and seeing what will stick,” Goldman said.

January 18, 2012
Los Angeles Times
Until this week, entertainment industry executives thought they had the votes for new fed-eral legislation cracking down on foreign websites that traffic in pirated movies and music and cost them billions. Then Silicon Valley struck back and appears to have outflanked Hollywood. The result was on full display Tuesday night as Wikipedia, Craigslist and other popular sites shut down for a threatened 12- to 24-hour strike, said to be the Internet’s first such stop-page. As many as 10,000 others had also threatened to go dark. “It was assumed by everyone that the content owners were going to get what they asked for,” said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law. “What’s happened is that the opposition campaign has gone viral. It’s not just Silicon Valley speaking up, it’s the public at large.”

January 1, 2012
Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel
The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a blue-ribbon panel created to study problems in the criminal justice system, called in 2006 for taping interrogations of felony suspects in custody. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger twice vetoed legislation that would have required it. In his 2007 veto, he said it would “deny law enforcement the flexibility necessary to interrogate suspects.” But Gerald Uelmen, a Santa Clara University law professor who was the commission’s executive director, said in an email that he didn't think cost was the chief obstacle. “There is just strong police resistance to anyone, including legislators, telling them how to do their job,” he said. “They are also concerned that malfunctioning equipment will create credibility problems for them.”