[elefanten]

There are laws and case law that set standards of varying degrees of precedent that both parties and the judge need to form their arguments around. The losing side can appeal to other courts and, in this case, the FTC can continue their own internal trial that has been scheduled for over a year and a half (surely, purely coincidentally scheduled for a month after the deal would contractually fall through). The same FTC that was extensively prepped and assisted in this trial by Sony and Google. The same Sony that has European Playstation headquarters in the UK, where it employs a lot of locals and where it announced a new modern office build shortly before the UK’s CMA announced it would block the Microsoft deal. All of the above whom own plenty of index funds that include copious amounts of Microsoft stock.

Go searching for connections and you’ll find them every which way. I suppose we should declare everything illegitimate and corrupt, go back to atomized subsistence farming.

[tremorscript]

Im sorry. Lets not generalize the problem, lets be specific to this case.

Your son is working for Microsoft, it is a billion dollar case, the question is What would you do? What are your standards?

[elefanten]

Oh, I shared plenty specific to the case that you've glossed right over. Why does your observation matter more than any of mine?

Do you have a theory of how the tenuous connection you state might induce a district court judge to risk harming her career by making a flimsy decision that can be overturned or, worse, risk criminal prosecution if she was found to be conspiring in illegal dereliction of her duty?

What's the scenario you're implying? You haven't even made an argument. The deal expands a business segment that accounts for less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue, it's not going to make her son rich in stock options. He's 3-4 years into his career and has held an entry-level role at Microsoft less than a year, it's not going to rocket him to the top of the org chart. What's the incentive to induce whatever crimes or corruption you leave unspoken?

You conveniently ignored the argument a sibling poster made that the FTC chose their venue. Why choose this one?

Your take is tabloid pundit banter. Extending such disproportionate knee-jerk prescriptions upon such thin logic would grind any activity to a halt.

[hnfong]

The mere appearance of bias is a consideration.

Generally, it's up to the judge to decide whether they should recuse themselves from the case. But I think it's fair game to raise such a concern.

Making up theories of how the judge could actually be conspiring to favor one party over the other is really unnecessary.

You know that the law isn't as concrete as you implied, right? It's not merely a mechanical application of rules. There's a lot of room for interpretation, and the interpretation of the rules and how they apply to the factual context has a huge influence to the outcome of the case. Skilled judges are able to write up reasons for awarding the case to either party. When two parties decide to go to court instead of settling, generally their lawyers do believe they have a reasonable chance of winning in court. So it's often not even hard for a judge to justify their decision. Having a judge who is ever so slightly biased towards one party would make it really difficult for the other party to play on a level ground.

There are usually no explicit incentives required for a judge to be biased. Just a general impression of "oh, these Microsoft people are quite nice, my son often tells me about the perks he enjoys at work" _could_ be sufficient to give Microsoft a slight but significant advantage in the case.

In general, I don't think you have any idea how the justice system works, and how delicate it can be. I don't know where you got your dismissive tone from. It's quite obvious you don't know sh!t.

[Jare]

If their son works for Microsoft in a position unrelated to this deal, there's absolutely no conflict of interest unless you actually prove real attempts to influence the resolution.

[hnfong]

Do you have a reference (case law, practice directions, code of conduct, legislation, etc.) for your assertion, or are you just pulling that from your ___ ?

[stOneskull]

blood is thicker after all..