Some actual sanity in a patent case?

Presumably she can now be sued for "criminal incompetence" or something? Anyone who's judgement is "clearly wrong" clearly should not be judging, and her malicious decision has caused very real damages.

Well there's a first time for everything And to be fair they are Australians rather than Americans. Our antipodean cousins always seemed much more sensible sorts...


You can't sue a judge for their judgements. Jesus, that really would be the legal system eating itself.

Jon

So the law is above the law, and there is no redress?

At the very least, if it's simple incompetence then she should be removed. You obviously can't have judges passing judgements that are "clearly wrong" - that is obviously perverse.

You can appeal the verdict - which is what has happened. You and the other side can keep on doing it at higher court levels until you get to the top level in whatever system you're operating under, then you stop. The law is not above the law, the law is the law. I'm not sure how something can be above itself.


Err.. they do it all the time. Judges aren't concerned with 'right' and 'wrong' as much as they are what is 'legally correct'. In any case, there may be a system for removing a judge from office in Australia, I don't know how that part of their legal system works.

Jon

I would say there's also a huge difference between an individual being able to sue a judge for their judgement (clearly going to create massive issues) and the judicial system having its own internal system for dealing with judges that pass down judgements of poor quality (much like a corporate disciplinary process).

It does however create some interesting questions about resitution if a judge has been genuinely shoddy in the way they have reached / justified their decision when people lose out massively one way or the other.

In a word, no. She's a federal judge so can only be removed by the governor-general (effectively Her Maj) - and even then for proved misbehaviour. As jonbwfc says, the whole reason we have an appeals system is to deal with bad judgements. Can you imagine the chaos if people were allowed to sue judges for their decisions? There'd be legal gridlock as every person who lost their case sued the judge in question. And what about criminal trials where the jury finds an innocent person guilty? Do we sue the jury as well?

Bennett's judgement was "clearly wrong" in the view of the appeal court. It may well be that the High Court, which is the next stop in this merry-go-round of legal loopiness, finds that her judgement was quite sound. That's assuming, of course, that the High Court even agrees to hear the case at all (it probably won't).

As for your contention that her judgement was "malicious" - it would be interesting to see you prove that in a case of libel or contempt.

If there was a real and serious penalty for coming to the wrong decision, then perhaps people would have more faith in the legal system. You can't have judges and juries passing sentence with impunity.

If a decision is later overturned, there is something wrong and someone must be to blame. If someone is to blame then they must be punished.

Well, judges pass sentences, not juries, but that aside ... it is kind of the whole point having of a legal system; the court is the final arbiter of what happened. But they don't always get it right, so there's a system of appeals that tries to ensure that a bad (or "unsound") decision gets overturned. And if someone is wrongly convicted of a crime they can seek damages (unless they live in a state with capital punishment, in which case they're kind of screwed).

I feel, however, that this has wandered way off the original topic.

This is true, but it's way more interesting than another round of Samsung vs Apple.

Addressing that point, I thought I should check to see if there was a special legal meaning.

"Malice is a legal term referring to a party's intention to do injury to another party." (from Wiki)

Preventing sales is an obvious injury which was clearly her intention - unless she lives in cloud cuckoo land and doesn't think her judgements have any effect on real people.

The challenge would be proving that was her motive; rather than the upholding of any IP laws. I think. I should stress I'm not trying to exhonerate the judge in any of this!

Apart from anything else, good luck getting one judge to throw another judge in jail

Of course judgements have an effect on real people - that's their whole point.

As for the case in question - of course it was her intention to prevent sales, since she felt Apple had a case that it had been wronged. Whether she did it to "injure" Samsung (as you contest) or to uphold the law as she interpreted it (as she would probably contest) is what you'd be arguing over in your libel and/or contempt trial. Good luck with that one.