Mickey Chandler's SpamSuite

Oral arguments were held in Spamhaus' appeal of the Default Judgment.

There is no transcript, but the Court has released an MP3 file of the oral arguments.

In my opinion, the judges were harder on e360's attorney and he seemed a lot easier to fluster. Spamhaus wants the Court to create a brand spankin' new rule for situations like this one where the district judge knows that there is a jurisdictional question involving an international, non-profit defendant. That rule would say that the judge should do something more than accept the Plaintiff's bare assertion that he has jurisdiction. e360, of course, says "That's not how we do things here."

My take on this argument is that the appellate judges found Spamhaus' request pretty reasonable. What they didn't like was how Spamhaus "appears to have gamed the system" (their words, not mine) by moving the case to federal court, making an Answer subject to their objections to jurisdiction, and then "taking their balls and going home" (e360's words, not mine).

e360's argument was a "slippery slope" argument. "If we let them have this rule, then do district judges have to argue for a defendant at a default hearing" kind of thing. It was their major rebuttal to "what would you say if we made the rule and then sent it back with instructions to pay your legal costs to this point."

And that's your 40 minutes of oral arguments in a nutshell.