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Friday Open Thread

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Good morning Obots and Happy Friday!

The African American Super Lawyer’s series concludes today with a profile of one of the nation’s premier intellectual property lawyers. 

Sharon Barner
 
Sharon Barner is a partner in the Chicago office of Foley & Lardner LLP where she specializes in intellectual property, patent law, and law and technology.
 
During the period 2009-2011, she briefly left Foley & Larner to serve as Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director, United States Patent and Trademark Office. In that position, Ms. Barner served as a leader in intellectual property (IP) policy and helped develop and articulate the Obama Administration positions on all patent, trademark and copyright issues. 
 

A close associate of President Barack Obama, Barner developed the 2010-2015 Strategic Plan designed to shorten the time it takes to grant a patent and to improve patent quality. In recognizing the increasing importance of IP in international trade, she led 15 foreign missions, including trips to Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Russia, to raise awareness of the importance of intellectual property.

At various times during her tenure at Foley & Lardner LLP, Ms. Barner has served as chair of the firm’s 240 lawyer Intellectual Property Department. She was also the first African American to sit on the firm’s 14-member Executive Management Committee. Under Barner’s term as chair of the IP Litigation Practice Group, Foley was ranked a top five firm for patent litigation defense and a top 10 patent litigation plaintiff firm by IP Law & Business.

While her technical science background is in biology, she has represented clients in a broad range of technologies from genetically engineered foods, to computers to satellites. In her 27 years of legal practice, she has also counseled clients in a wide variety of technologies including electronics, chemical composition, biotechnology, business methods, and automobile filters.

Among other matters, Ms. Barner represented Pioneer Hi-Bred International in genetically engineered corn seed litigation and successfully tried a six-week jury trial involving misappropriation of trade secrets, securing a $2.6 million damage award in Rockwell Graphics v. Dev, Inc. She also successfully represented Hughes Aircraft Co. in a 10-month patent infringement trial involving infringement of satellite stabilizing technology resulting in an award of $154 million, the largest patent infringement judgment against the United States to date.

Ms. Barner has been featured as a top intellectual property lawyer in leading magazines, including The National Law Journal, where she was named one of “The 50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America,” Black Enterprise Magazine,  Diversity and the Bar and “Patent Plums: Who’s Enforcing the Most Important Patents” IP Law & Business. She was also selected for inclusion in Illinois Super Lawyers® lists for her intellectual property litigation work (2005-2009).
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Ms. Barner received her law degree from the University of Michigan in 1982 and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree, cum laude, from Syracuse University in 1979.

 
 

Friday Open Thread

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Good morning P.O.U Fam! Friday is finally here.

The final notable Heisman Trophy Winner is 2010 recipient Cam Newton.

A native of College Park, Ga, Cameron “Cam” Newton (born May 11, 1989) made a significant impact on the 2010 college football season. Beginning his college career at the University of Florida as a highly recruited quarterback from Westlake High School, Cam Newton saw limited playing time as a backup until his early departure from UF in 2008.

In 2009, Newton led Blinn College to the Junior College National Championship. At the end of the 2009 football season, Cam Newton decided to take his football talents to Auburn University.


College Career

On the field for the Auburn Tigers in 2010, Cam Newton led his team to an undefeated 12-0 season including a historical come from behind win against the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The Tigers capped off their season with a win against the South Carolina Gamecocks in the SEC Championship and a victory over the Oregon Ducks in the BCS National Championship game.

Multiple individual awards were bestowed upon him including, AP Player of the Year, Walter Camp Award, Maxwell Award, Davey O’Brien Award, and the most prestigious college football award, the Heisman Trophy. Newton is only the 3rd player in major college football history to pass for 20 touchdowns and rush for 20 touchdowns in a single season.

Pro Career

On July 29, 2011, Newton signed a four-year deal with the Carolina Pantworth over $22 million that is fully guaranteed.A month later on September 1, 2011, he was listed as the number one quarterback for the team.

In his NFL debut game on September 11, 2011, Newton was 24–37 passing for 422 yards, 2 touchdowns and 1 interception, in a 28–21 road loss to the Arizona Cardinals. With a quarterback rating of 110.4, he also rushed for a touchdown, and became the first rookie to throw for 400+ yards in his first career game. His 422 passing yards broke Peyton Manning’s rookie record for most passing yards on opening day.

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Friday Open Thread

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Good morning P.O.U. Fam!

The Lawyers of the Civil Rights Era series concludes today with “Mr. Justice” — Thurgood Marshall.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908, Justice Marshall was the grandson of a slave.  After completing high school in 1925, Justice Marshall followed his brother at the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. His classmates at Lincoln included a distinguished group of future Black leaders such as the poet and author Langston Hughes, the future President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and musician Cab Calloway.

In 1930, he applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but was denied admission because he was Black. This was an event that was to haunt him and direct his future professional life. Justice Marshall sought admission and was accepted at the Howard University Law School that same year and came under the immediate influence of the dynamic new dean, Charles Hamilton Houston.

LOST THURGOOD MARSHALL INTERVIEW with MIKE WALLACE

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A Thurgood Marshall Timeline: 
   
  1933 Receives law degree from Howard U. (magna cum laude); begins private practice in Baltimore
     
  1934 Begins to work for Baltimore branch of NAACP
  1935 With Charles Houston, wins first major civil rights case, Murray v. Pearson (desegregating University of Maryland Law School)
  1936 Becomes assistant special counsel for NAACP in New York
  1940 Wins first of 29 Supreme Court victories (Chambers v. Florida) (police pressure)
  1944 Successfully argues Smith v. Allwright, overthrowing the South’s “white primary”
  1948 Wins Shelley v. Kramer, in which Supreme Court strikes down legality of racially restrictive covenants
  1950 Wins Supreme Court victories in two graduate-school integration cases, Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents
  1951 Visits South Korea and Japan to investigate charges of racism in U.S. armed forces. He reported that the general practice was one of “rigid segregation”.
  1954 Wins Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, landmark case that demolishes legal basis for segregation in America
  1961 Defends civil rights demonstrators, winning Supreme Circuit Court victory in Garner v. Louisiana; nominated to Second Court of Appeals by President J.F. Kennedy
  1961 Appointed circuit judge, makes 112 rulings, all of them later upheld by Supreme Court (1961-1965)
  1965 Appointed U.S. solicitor general by President Lyndon Johnson; wins 14 of the 19 cases he argues for the government (1965-1967)
  1967 Becomes first African American elevated to U.S. Supreme Court (1967-1991)
  1991 Retires from the Supreme Court
  1993 Passes away at 84

Source: This biography is provided by ThurgoodMarshall College.


 

Friday Open Thread

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The Fantastic Four

This week, in Libya, thousands of people celebrated carrying posters of  The Fantastic Four:

Obama, Rice, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

All four played a leading role in supporting the people of Libya in their overthrow of a tyrant. But it was America that played the crucial role. It was America that decided at a key moment to invest in protecting the lives of others and to join with NATO not to overthrow a regime, but to help the people of Libya make the regime change that only they could effect.

That is leadership. That is smart. And this is what victory feels like.

Joe Cirincionne: Libyan Victory Validates Obama Doctrine