But you did do it, there. Given what you put it down to, should we be concerned about you having totalitarian leanings?
Just to remind … this case is not about whether the team gets to use the name, keep the name, say the name; it’s not about whether it can enforce its rights in the name; it’s not about whether it should or will or be required to change the name.
It’s solely about whether it will get to keep its trademark registrations. Not whether it will get to keep its trademarks, but only whether it will keep its trademark registrations. Those are not the same thing.
And that fact, in my view, makes the stakes in this case almost entirely symbolic.
Not in the slightest!
I do have them, to be sure, but should my total world domination come to pass, it will usher in a new era of peace and prosperity unparalled in human history. So you should certainly not be concerned.
Not in agreement with this. The stakes are fidelity to our caselaw concerning the First Amendment. We have shaped the First Amendment to mean that, inter alia, that the government’s disapproval of a particular message, or its belief that a message will be hurtful to others, cannot justify the denial of government benefits such as those conferred by the Lanham Act, however symbolic you feel those benefits are.
Your argument would have been stronger if you had left this part off.
Were one to believe that the benefits of registration be symbolic, then that also means that the stakes be symbolic.
Don’t they all say that?
And we have shaped it to include numerous exceptions with much broader implications. If content-based regulation of trademark registrations is a First Amendment violation, so is the Hatch Act.
That’s not even an apples to oranges comparison. The Hatch Act is a restriction on professional conduct within the government and has no legal relationship to the first amendment.
Not remotely accurate. Government-as-employer has much more room to demand or suppress expressive content than government-as-benefits-purveyor.
Soon we’ll have a new judicial finding, “Sports teams are people!”
In 2015, I said:
And today, 8-0 (with Justice Gorsuch taking no part given his late arrival), the Slants win.
Comments?
“It offends a bedrock First Amendment principle: Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend,” ~ Samuel Alito, J.
I always thought the bit about claiming the official trademark made it “government speech” was just a way of avoiding the inevitable.
I’m pleased with the decision in the Slants case, and I have to agree the same should apply to the Redskins.
For what it’s worth, I have a far more positive view of the Slants use of a slur (reclaiming the word) than the Redskins use of one – but that doesn’t mean the law should treat them differently.
I was wrong.
Make sure to bookmark this post. Some guy likes to run unofficial “who is the most righteous man that can admit error” contests around here.
This is good news for my new band, My Ex-Girlfriend Megan Roche is a Whore.
(To make it perfectly clear, the personal name is completely made up.)
It’s good news for free speech. If you want to use it to publicize your feelings towards your ex-girlfriend, that’s up to you.
It’s a small club, to be sure. But FWIW, I never thought that RNATB was not a member.
Confusingly doubly negative. I always knew RNATB was someone who had no trouble admitting error in the rare event such error happened.
There would be a further question of invasion of privacy and defamation.
From the argument in Tam:
My guess would be that if it came down to it, you would be found liable for a tort against Megan Roche and be hit with an injunction barring further use of that trademark in commerce, regardless of whether you had a right to register it under the federal trademark statute.
Hey, it’s right there in my name. 