[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.