Hi, and welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we update you on the Supreme Court gerrymandering case we discussed in a segment last September, and then cover a recent dispute over Triple Crown trademarks that is timely considering we had a second Triple Crown winner in the last 4 years happen when Justify achieved the feat a couple weeks ago.
Back in September, we did a deep dive into a Wisconsin dispute over partisan gerrymandering at the Supreme Court. The Wisconsin plaintiffs sought to have the courts step in and stop the drawing of voting district lines in such a manner that was heavily biased towards one political party, AKA, whoever controls the state legislature when the lines are drawn. That case, Gill v. Whitford, was disposed of this week with a remand to the lower courts based on procedural issues. The Supreme Court declined to decide this on the merits because the individual plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge the entire state map, just their own district.
So unfortunately, we will not find out if the so called "efficiency gap" or other statistical measures presented in this case would be enough to convince the swing vote Justice Kennedy that the courts could have an objective standard to step in for such circumstances. The fight in election law over gerrymandering will continue in a different venue for now.
We will update on further major Supreme Court decisions as they wrap up the term in the next couple weeks.
Turning to the other story for today, the horse Justify became just the 13th Triple Crown winner when he won the Belmont Stakes a couple weeks ago. Ironically, this occurs as two horse-related retailers are duking it out on court over the rights to a Triple Crown trademark.
Triple Crown Nutrition is a Minnesota company that sells feed for horses, and they filed an opposition to an application for trademark on the name "Triple Crown Custom" for saddles and other equestrian equipment by Ireland-based Horseware Products. Triple Crown Nutrition has had their name registered at the Trademark Office for a number of years, which is the grounds for bringing this challenge to the new application.
Now here's the interesting bit of the conflict: trademarks are registered to cover certain types of goods and services offered under the mark. The goods don't really overlap here, as the Minnesota company sells feed and pharmaceutical preparations, while the Ireland company seeks to sell saddles and collars. But Triple Crown Nutrition argues that because these different goods are marketed to the same consumers, a likelihood of confusion would occur for consumers and that should be enough to cancel the latter trademark application for Triple Crown Custom.
However, we also know from marks like Delta that different companies selling different products and services can co-exist. But the overlap is not as close as in this case, and trademark conflicts often occur when product lines change and merge over time to overlap with other companies.
The Bottom Line is, the risk of such eventual overlap seems high in this case, which would favor the Minnesota company. But there's no current overlap, and that could undermine this challenge as these two horse sellers race to the finish line. It will be an interesting close call to watch in trademark law, as we get over our frustrations at the Supreme Court punting on a fascinating gerrymandering case based on mere procedural issues.
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