[ga-roots] Re: Understanding legal precedence

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>]

At 14:35 07.05.2001 +1000, Patrick Corliss wrote:
>Non-member submission from ["Milton Mueller" <mueller@syr.edu>]
>
>Harald:
>An incorrect statement.
>
>The judge did not make a decision. You cannot lose a
>case when there is no decision. Full stop.

hmm....the request for injunctive relief was denied; this is a decision.

We can agree that there was no judgment on a full-blown case, since 
IODesign (wisely, IMHO) chose to withdraw.

But I have trouble comprehending the argument that no decision was made.
Divided by a common language?

>More to the point, the whole Ambler-Postel-IAHC
>brouhaha has utterly no legal significance, for the
>reasons noted below.
>
>The ironic thing about the controversy is that Simon
>gives a lot of weight to Postel's decisions, as if
>Postel really had legal authority over the DNS root
>at that time. But Postel's lawyer later denied that he
>had any authority over the root in the Name.Space
>case, and kicked the ball back to the National Science
>Foundation.
>
>The most accurate thing one can say about that period
>(96-97) is that authority over the root was unclear,
>and contested by several parties. A local judge's
>musings in an initial legal skirmish have no bearing
>on what would happen now. The only serious legal
>decision on a related issue is the disposal of the Name.space case.

Do you have the referents (court filing number and so on) handy?
it is always nice to have some facts lying around...

Not that it has ANY real significance - the thing ICANN seems well prepared 
for (the only thing?) is a legal challenge to its authority; the Postel 
IANA seemed genuinely surprised by this, and reacted accordingly.


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