Happy Columbus Day! Due to today’s legal holiday, the Court has scheduled a short week of oral arguments, with three arguments scheduled for Tuesday.
The first case scheduled for Tuesday morning, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., et al. v. Apple Inc., is the first of several intellectual property cases this Term. That case arises out of an lawsuit alleging that Samsung had infringed several of Apple’s patents covering components of the iPhone. The trial court awarded a whopping $399 million in damages to Apple, which included essentially all of Samsung’s profits from the infringing products. Samsung contends that the lower courts erred by awarding “entire profits” – all of the profits obtained from the infringing product – instead of simply the profits obtained from the infringing component. This case could have a dramatic effect on the volume of intellectual property litigation in coming years.
After that, the Court hears argument in Pena-Rodriguez v. Colorado, a Sixth Amendment challenge to the common-law “no impeachment” rule (codified in the federal system at Federal Rule of Evidence 606(b)) that generally forbids jurors from testifying about deliberations. The Supreme Court’s most recent experience with the no-impeachment rule came in Warger v. Shauers (2014), in which Justice Sotomayor wrote for a unanimous court that the rule forbade consideration of an affidavit indicating that a juror had lied during voir dire. The trial court in this case invoked the rule in refusing to consider evidence indicating that a juror had urged the other jurors to convict the defendant based in part on awful stereotypes about his ethnicity. We’ll find out how committed the Court is to Warger and the traditional rule.
The final argument on Tuesday concerns the procedural avenues for challenging a restitution award entered as part of a criminal sentencing judgment.
The Court returns for its November sitting on October 31. Also, the argument transcripts and audio for last week’s arguments in Shaw, Salman, and the other cases are now available at the Supreme Court website.