Speaking of Tim Lee, he has written an excellent appreciation of John Paul Stevens on his retirement from the Supreme Court. Though Stevens is identified as a liberal, he has won the respect and admiration of many libertarians, including Tim, for his keen understanding of the evolving technology landscape.

When Justice Stevens joined the court, many of the technologies we now take for granted—the PC, packet-switched networks, home video recording—were in their infancy. During his 35-year tenure on the bench, Stevens penned decisions that laid the foundation for the tremendous innovations that followed in each of these areas.
For example, Stevens penned the 1978 decision that shielded the software industry from the patent system in its formative years. In 1984, Hollywood’s effort to ban the VCR failed by just one Supreme Court vote; Stevens wrote the majority opinion. And in 1997, he wrote the majority opinion striking down the worst provisions of the Communications Decency Act and ensuring that the Internet would have robust First Amendment protections.
Indeed, Justice Stevens probably deserves more credit than any other justice for the innovations of the last three decades. And given how central those technologies have become to the American economy, Stevens’ tech policy work may prove one of his most enduring legacies.

Be sure to read the entire article. Rather depressingly, we have no reason to believe that Justice Stevens’s successor, or for that matter any of his erstwhile colleagues, understands how technological innovation works nearly as well.

Tim has also blogged about the disappointing Bilski decision, in which Justice Scalia played a key role.

As it turned out, the Supreme Court was split down the middle. The court’s liberals sided with an opinion by Justice Stevens, while four of the court’s conservatives backing an opinion by Justice Kennedy. That might not seem surprising on today’s polarized Supreme Court, but it’s a new development for patent law. On the rare occasions when the justices have disagreed about a patent case, (as they did with dueling concurrences in eBay v. MercExchange) there hasn’t been a clear partisan split.
But in this case, the conservatives favored the status quo, while the liberals wanted to place new limits on business method patents. Bilski was argued in November, so a decision was expected in March or April; court watchers were puzzled when June arrived with no decision. My guess is that the swing voter, Justice Scalia, spent those months negotiating to decide which opinion to join.

In the end, Justice Scalia very narrowly sided with Justice Kennedy, without endorsing some of the more sweeping claims in the majority opinion. So there is at least some hope that Justice Scalia skepticism regarding software patents will come to the fore at some later date.