Something nice for a change...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fea...es/Learned_Hand

qp10qp and Slp1 pretty much rewrote an article that (rumours said) Brad had wanted to get featured.

Looks like social networking concerns are again dominating editorial decisions. Let's make this the best-est article ever for the Gipper.

That's a nice article.

Here's a pop culture reference to the man: a fed district court judge named Brevard Hand once earned a certain fitting sobriquet, by way of the secular humanists:

Whatev.

This is a hobby. NYB is a nice guy. Doing nice things for nice people is about having social graces, not social networking.

Making this article good, instead of a different one, if that's what people want to do, is just fine. Yes, there are other things that need doing, arguably some of them need doing worse, but there is no harm in improving this one.

The resort to the "In Memoriam" crap is cloying, especial given that the man ain't dead. Just let the article stand or fall on it's own, without signaling your noble motivation. Better to be some people in this "hobby" than some others.

It should mention that Richard Posner (possibly the most prolific COA judge in this era) idolizes Learned Hand. Posner takes the Hand formula as a starting point for the economic analysis of law. If it wasn't for Posner, L. Hand would probably not be associated with the Hand Formula at all; Carroll Towing was only put into the casebooks after Posner published an article about it in 1972, "A Theory of Negligence Law" 1 Journal of Legal Studies 29 (1972). Because of Posner, the case is considered a classic. It was not well-known during Hand's lifetime.

In fact, it's a little strange to me that the article could get so long without mentioning Posner.

If you don't mind my saying, the connection with Posner merits much, much more weight than the connection with "Unlearned Hand."

Of course! The other was just a tidbit of trivia, put in for the smile value. Why else do humans educate, if not so they can create somebody who finally knows enough to laugh at a sarcastic allusion?

The other bit is that someone needs to bluebook the cases. The fact that they haven't been spruced up leads me to believe that the prime movers for improving the article don't have legal training. That's an obstacle, I think.

Article is heavy on just a few biographies, without much legal analysis.

Of the cases he authored that are linked, United States v. Carroll Towing Co. and Masses Publishing more or less suck, and I'm honestly surprised that there's no article on the ALCOA antitrust case. That's an influential case and has kind of an amusing set up. The Supreme Court could not take it because a majority of them had a conflict of interest, so the Second Circuit was charged with writing the last word on the decision--Hand's word. It's a decision monumental both for its precedent and its direct impact on a very large U.S. industry. There's also tons of criticism about this decision; the Alcoa article has a sample from Alan Greenspan, but the literature is legion. Should have an article.

It's really weird that his presidential voting record and energy conservation habits get more coverage than many of his significant cases. Hell, a lot of them aren't even mentioned. They don't even link correctly to cases they do have, like Ulysses. No coverage on patent law at all, which is surprising. Some of his patent cases are still cited. He had a better grasp on the policy reasons for patent law than most of his contemporaries. There's a treatise about his patent cases alone. I guess patent and antitrust aren't as sexy as free speech.

This article could easily be broken up summary style, and probably should be.

And... at this point I don't think I can pitch in now lest I out myself. Just as well, I don't have a good enough knowledge of the subject to do him justice, but I know enough to see that the article needs work.

YET MORE: They misspelled U.S. v. Kennerly, which is hard to pick up because--stunningly--no reporter citations exist anywhere in the article (209 F. 119, if you were wondering).

Hai! How about getting Wikipedia Review to Featured status? Get on it! Bai!

This is excellent commentary, One. I've commented on the FAC linking to it, hopefully they'll take in board. Would you prefer me to copy paste your comments there (ie. do you GFDL them?) so they don't get lost amongst the ruckus here?

Here's my comment: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=228531045


They don't - I recall when asking for peer review comments qp10qp specifically said that neither of the authors had legal training and were thus asking for help with jargon and stuff related to that. I agree it could be an obstacle, but since I don't have any legal training either I can't really confirm either way.

Assuming the permission is mine to give (I've never studied the terms of service here), you have my full permission.

naturally, one should take Judge Posner's view of Hand with a grain of salt. One should be skeptical of people who claim that great thinkers of the past are prototypical versions of themselves. There's plenty of academic dissent to Posner's interpretation. That said, Posner should be mentioned because his work uncovered a rule of negligence now attributed to Hand, the "Hand Formula," which is covered in the article.

A law editor (wikidea) finally talked them into including reporter citations. That's good, but they're all formatted incorrectly. The second series Federal Reporter is cited as "F.2d" not "F. (2nd)" or "F.2nd." For example, it should read "United States v. Levine, 83 F.2d 156 (2nd Cir. 1936)."

One of the authors says, "I do not think it is necessary or appropriate for this article to be a detailed overview of his legal opinions."

Yeah, ok, as long as an article on Shakespeare wouldn't include a detailed overview of his plays.

Look, I'm going to admit I'm biased. I learned about "L. Hand" the same way most people with legal training did: by encountering his cases in almost every class, from torts, to antitrust, to contracts, to con law. I realize that this isn't a superior view of him, and I'm impressed with how this article covers his life. I didn't know a lot of it.

That said, there's a reason that people have written about his life, his romance, and his voting record. All judges have such quirks and stories; all humans do, in fact. The key to his notability is his work as a judge, and that cannot be conveyed without a survey of the cases and their enduring influence.

On that note, I totally botched the explanation of Posner. It's not that Posner plucked him out of obscurity, it's that Posner initiated an academic debate about the meaning of his work. Carroll Towing, as I said, would not be included in an article like this save for Posner's work. The users are quite right that his interpretations are controversial, but that's kind of the whole point. As is, the article just mentions the calculus for legal negligence, but doesn't cite the literature that surrounds the issue. It is controversial, so if you're going to mention Carroll Towing, it would probably be appropriate to mention the scholarship around it.

The article says that Hand's "decisions in patent, copyright, and admiralty cases have contributed to the development of law in those fields." It makes an opaque footnote to the bald assertion. How about adding some cases to the note. Here are some examples from in-print casebooks:
Patent: Metallizing Engineering Co. v. Kenyon Bearing, 153 F.2d 516, 68 USPQ 54 (2nd Cir. 1946) ("a condition upon an inventor's right to a patent is that he shall not exploit her discovery competitively after it is ready for patenting, he must content himself with either secrecy or a legal monopoly.") - alive and well, recently cited by the Federal Circuit in Pfaff in spite of its age.
Copyright Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., 45 F.2d 119 (2d Cir. 1930) (imitating themes of a work cannot be precluded by copyright, just actual copying) - famous copyright case sometimes credited as introducing Hand's "abstractions test."

What does "competitively" mean in this case? How would it apply to the formula for Coca Cola, for instance? If Coke is mere "secrecy," then does "competitively" mean seeking remedies against copying (RC Cola, Pepsi, etc.) within a legal framework? That's sort of a given with patents-- if you didn't patent, then you can't legal complain about people copying you. The exception being when somebody else copies your unpatented thing and then tries to patent THAT for their own. I would think you could argue that "prior art" doesn't just include previous patents, but also well-known practice. If Salk publishes polio vaccine instructions without patent, that pretty much takes out the core for everybody else who wants to.

Yeah, that's basically right. If Salk himself didn't file for patent within a year of his article, it's likely nobody would have the right to patent it. With Coca-Cola it means that they couldn't file for (or sue with) a patent for their softdrink. Having enjoyed many years of commercial secrecy, they are not now allowed to get a patent monopoly on Coke's composition.

The law basically says pick one: (1) trade secret, (2) patent.

Patents must be filed within a year of an invention's first publication, sale, or public use. (When this case was decided, the period was two years.) If you don't file within that period, the patent right is lost forever. (This is actually a lenient rule--in other countries you have to file before you can even publish.) In this case, a company used a process for metallizing surfaces--and sold the finished products--more than two years before the inventor filed for patent. When suing for infringement, the defendant argued that the inventor had forfeit their patent by this use. The plaintiff argued that the use was "secret" so could not count as prior art against them. Learned Hand affirmed the decision in favor of the defendants on appeal; the patent was invalidated. Secret-but-commercial use was a "public use" for the purposes of the statute.

This sounds wrong linguistically, but it's correct policy. Otherwise every company would try to keep their processes secret until they started to become publicly known, then file for patent to get a 20 year legal monopoly. This would delay the time period that the invention is freely usable to the public. It would also deter people from filing for patents early, and make them unnecessarily secretive and unforthcoming. Under Learned Hand's decision, people are free to put their faith in trade secret, but they can't try for both. If inventors think they can keep their inventions secret for longer than 20 years, they're free to pursue secrecy. But they can't do that and then get a patent on top of it.

Okay, got that. There's an even more stringent provision (perhaps from later case law) that even a company which is NOT marketing some secret invention that they later intend to patent, must nevertheless show in a later patent battle that they've been pursuing development and patent-seeking with diligence since the date of the invention. This, to keep some auto company with the mythical 100 mpg carburetor from putting it in a safe and not doing anything with it commercially at all (even competitively), until it looks like somebody else might be close to getting the same thing, THEN patenting.

Note how different this is from copyright, where a corporation gets 95 years from publication, or (if not published) 120 years from date of creation. One more instance where inventors are totally screwed with regard to authors and artists.

Yeah, that's abandonment doctrine. A key case for that is Peeler v. Miller, 535 F.2d 647, 190 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 117 (CCPA 1976) (Rich, J.), where Monsanto took like four years to file for a patent. In the meantime, someone else developed the invention, then went to file for patent. Monsanto's invention (an aircraft lubricant) wasn't sold or published or anything, but they lost their patent claim to any subsequent inventor because of their inexcusable delay. Inventors must be diligent in bringing their inventions to the public. This doctrine has expanded since it was codified in the 1952 patent act. Originally, it was limited to interferences, but now it comes up in infringement lawsuits.

If you "abandon, suppress, or conceal" your invention by never writing about it, or working on it, or selling it after an unreasonable amount of time, you lose your rights to anyone else that discovers it. Once you do sell or publish, a one year clock starts ticking for you to file patents. That's abandonment and statutory bar, respectively. Hand's case was about the latter.