Live blog of opinions - June 30, 2020
We live-blogged on Tuesday, June 30, as the court released opinions in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com and Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. SCOTUSblog is sponsored by Casetext: making litigation more efficient with A.I. and machine learning technology.
3rd & 7 37yd
3rd & 7 37yd
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"Consumers, according to lower court determinations uncontested here by the PTO, do not perceive the term 'Booking.com' to signify online hotel-reservation services as a class. In circumstances like those this case presents, a 'generic.com' term is not generic and can be eligible for federal trademark registration."
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Sotomayor's concurring opinion adds "two observations": The court's opinion does not suggest "that surveys are the 'be-all and end-all" of determining whether a mark is generic. And the PTO may have properly concluded that Booking.com is generic but that question is not before the Court.
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Lots of questions about the order in which opinions are issued, etc.; we don't have time to address them all, but many are addressed in our FAQs: https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/06/faqs-announcements-of-orders-and-opinions-4/
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This is a case in which the Montana Supreme Court ruled that a program which provided a tax credit for scholarships at private schools violated the state constitution. The question was whether the Free Exercise Clause of the U.S. Constitution barred that application of the state's constitution.
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Alito's concurrence is interesting. He notes that in the unanimous jury case, he argued that the racist origins of Louisiana's non-unanimous jury rule was irrelevant. He says because he lost, it is now relevant whether Montana's constitutional provision is rooted in religious discrimination. He then argues at length that it was based in anti-Catholic prejudice (an issue the majority of the Court avoided by holding that the provision discriminates on its face).
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Roberts writes that the court's recent decision in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer "distilled" the Court's precedents into the "unremarkable" conclusion "that disqualifying otherwise eligible recipients from a public benefit solely because of their religious character imposes 'a penalty on the free exercise of religion that triggers the most exacting scrutiny.'"
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In this case, "Montana's no-aid provision bars religious schools from public benefits solely because of the religious character of the schools. The provision also bars parents who wish to send their children to a religious school from those same benefits, again solely because of the religious character of the school."