YA HEARD?!?
The Barrister
Damn, kids. So much law shit creeping into our sports shit, you'd think I'd be popping on here more often to explain to you plebes how the world works, but I gots stuff to do. I'll break down my thoughts on the Bills trust soon and how the revelation by Mark Poloncarz that the trustees who decide on the Bills sale may have a "fiduciary duty" to sell to the highest bidder is the most obvious-as-fuck revelation since Mike Harrington revealed he likes Soft Batch cookies and tall glasses of warm milk. NO FUCKING WAY! Our media fails us, again, if for no other reason that that it took about two months for someone to actually consider the legal obligations in play with the Bills and that perhaps irrelevant is the shared hope of proving our eternal devotion to the Bills trustees so that they'll be overcome with a certain sense of civic pride and sell the team to Jim Kelly for pennies and leave us all in a land of bliss and tailgate blunts and shotgunned beers in perpetuity.
BUT THAT RANT IS FOR ANOTHER DAY.
Damn, kids. So much law shit creeping into our sports shit, you'd think I'd be popping on here more often to explain to you plebes how the world works, but I gots stuff to do. I'll break down my thoughts on the Bills trust soon and how the revelation by Mark Poloncarz that the trustees who decide on the Bills sale may have a "fiduciary duty" to sell to the highest bidder is the most obvious-as-fuck revelation since Mike Harrington revealed he likes Soft Batch cookies and tall glasses of warm milk. NO FUCKING WAY! Our media fails us, again, if for no other reason that that it took about two months for someone to actually consider the legal obligations in play with the Bills and that perhaps irrelevant is the shared hope of proving our eternal devotion to the Bills trustees so that they'll be overcome with a certain sense of civic pride and sell the team to Jim Kelly for pennies and leave us all in a land of bliss and tailgate blunts and shotgunned beers in perpetuity.
BUT THAT RANT IS FOR ANOTHER DAY.
I expect your appetite to be whetted.
Nay, today is not about the crippling sense of Ralph Wilson's failures and the inevitability of the trustees' duty of loyalty to the bank accounts of named beneficiaries rather than an amalgamate of hapless sports fans with grills and RVs and little to no sense of limits. Today is about motherfucking JUSTICE.
I fucking love justice. I love it in all its forms and I love it when the people given the power to seek it through judicial process actually find it. Justice is fucking great.
Rarely, it seems, is the journey to justice a simple task. Somewhere along the way - and I'll assume it was way fucking back because people have been shitty forfuckingever, basically - the concept of justice became bastardized and co-opted so as to mean something uniquely personal. The meaning of justice co-mingles with each of our personal ideas of right and wrong and, more to the point, our personal desire to feel good - personally good - about outcomes. Justice becomes about getting our way, though rarely do we stop and take a thorough account of how many different interests and desires are competing for predominance. Rarely do we appreciate that sometimes justice produces arguably shitty outcomes, or outcomes that piss some of us off, or outcomes that suggest we should reform our system of justice in subtle or substantial ways ... and all of that is generally ok. You are not entitled to getting your way all the time. In fact, a just system might be one that ensures you don't.
All of which is to say that if you're looking at what the U.S. Patent Office did and you're angry about Free Speech or Dan Snyder's liberty or the storied tradition of a fucking football team, well, TOUGH. FUCKING. BREAKS. This went down in exactly the way it should have ... perhaps even a decade or two late. This is American justice. OUR American justice. And it's fucking beautiful. Get on board.
Some truths for you to chew on, if you're so inclined:
I fucking love justice. I love it in all its forms and I love it when the people given the power to seek it through judicial process actually find it. Justice is fucking great.
Rarely, it seems, is the journey to justice a simple task. Somewhere along the way - and I'll assume it was way fucking back because people have been shitty forfuckingever, basically - the concept of justice became bastardized and co-opted so as to mean something uniquely personal. The meaning of justice co-mingles with each of our personal ideas of right and wrong and, more to the point, our personal desire to feel good - personally good - about outcomes. Justice becomes about getting our way, though rarely do we stop and take a thorough account of how many different interests and desires are competing for predominance. Rarely do we appreciate that sometimes justice produces arguably shitty outcomes, or outcomes that piss some of us off, or outcomes that suggest we should reform our system of justice in subtle or substantial ways ... and all of that is generally ok. You are not entitled to getting your way all the time. In fact, a just system might be one that ensures you don't.
All of which is to say that if you're looking at what the U.S. Patent Office did and you're angry about Free Speech or Dan Snyder's liberty or the storied tradition of a fucking football team, well, TOUGH. FUCKING. BREAKS. This went down in exactly the way it should have ... perhaps even a decade or two late. This is American justice. OUR American justice. And it's fucking beautiful. Get on board.
Some truths for you to chew on, if you're so inclined:
- The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office did this, ultimately, because five Native Americans filed a petition in 2006 and litigated it to fruition. Without the petition, there is no trademark revocation. Someone with standing - i.e. a personal stake in the issue - had to step up to the plate so as to achieve this particular relief. This is not the work of Democratic senators, as some pissants have whinged over the past day. This is legal process being exercised by Americans and American judicial process - in this case, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the federal agency legally authorized to oversee trademark registration - going through the mechanics that lead to a result. So, to sum up: STOP BLAMING EVERYTHING ON THE POLITICIANS YOU HATE BECAUSE IT MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE A PETTY IGNORANT PIECE OF SHIT.
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