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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. I'm June Grosso. Every

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Speaker 1: day we bring you insight and analysis into the most

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Speaker 1: important legal news of the day. You can find more

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Speaker 1: episodes at the Bloomberg Law Podcast, on Apple podcast, SoundCloud,

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Speaker 1: and on Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. The Justices don't

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Speaker 1: return to the bench until next month, but there's plenty

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Speaker 1: of action at the Supreme Court. The Justices have decided

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Speaker 1: to give Google a hearing in its multibillion dollar clash

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Speaker 1: with Oracle, and President Trump is asking the court to

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Speaker 1: block subpoenas for his financial records and reverse the decisions

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Speaker 1: of federal appellate courts in d C. And New York,

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Speaker 1: something that the chief Judge of the Second Circuit, Robert Katzman,

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Speaker 1: predicted this case seems bound for the Supreme Court. Joining

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Speaker 1: me is Greg Store. Bloomberg New Supreme Court reporter Greg

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Speaker 1: tell us about the two cases that President Trump wants

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Speaker 1: the Justices to take. Two cases very different legal issues,

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Speaker 1: but the same sort of feel to them. In one,

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Speaker 1: New York District Attorney Cyrus Advance Jr. Is trying to

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Speaker 1: get copies of Trump's tax returns for a grand jury investigation.

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Speaker 1: That request is currently on hold. The lower court said

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Speaker 1: he's entitled to get those requests, though is on hold

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Speaker 1: while Trump asked the Supreme Court to hear his appeal.

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Speaker 1: The other case involves the House of Representatives and a committee,

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Speaker 1: not the committee that's that's looking into impeaching President Trump,

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Speaker 1: a committee that wants Trump's financial records as part of

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Speaker 1: what it says is a potential legislative change to the

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Speaker 1: federal ethics laws. Again, a federal appeals court has said

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Speaker 1: the House is entitled to those documents. Trump is trying

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Speaker 1: to get the Supreme Court to block that request, so

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Speaker 1: Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily blocked the subpoena. Why explain

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Speaker 1: that whole process that's in the House case. Had he

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Speaker 1: not done that as it was set up, there was

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Speaker 1: going to be a point where the House could have

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Speaker 1: demanded that President Trump's accounting for a Mazurs turn over

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Speaker 1: those documents. This just basically kept everything in place while

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Speaker 1: the Court decides whether to issue a longer delay and

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Speaker 1: then ultimately decide whether to take up the president's appeal.

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Speaker 1: And here arguments so greg to other presidents have tried

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Speaker 1: and failed to get out of legal processes at the

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Speaker 1: Supreme Court. So what are the chances the justices will

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Speaker 1: take this case? Probably pretty good ageven that there are

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Speaker 1: two cases. You know, it might be possible to duck

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Speaker 1: one of them. It's harder to duck two of them.

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Speaker 1: It is the President of the United States asking for it.

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Speaker 1: It may be that a majority of the justices on

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Speaker 1: the court see his arguments as as a bit of

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Speaker 1: a reach, because, particularly in the New York case, the

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Speaker 1: president's private lawyer argued that the president has basically absolute

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Speaker 1: immunity from any criminal investigations while he's in office. But

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Speaker 1: it is the president he is saying, it is making

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Speaker 1: it harder for me to do my job. Now, it

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Speaker 1: would be quite something for the Supreme Court to say, no,

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Speaker 1: we don't even want to hear that argument. We're not

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Speaker 1: even going to entertain that. Let's turn to a case

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Speaker 1: that the justices will be considering. That's the Google Oracle case.

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Speaker 1: Tell us about that. Yeah, this is a case that

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Speaker 1: is potentially worth billions of dollars. A federal appeals court

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Speaker 1: lower court found that Google infringed Oracles copyrights on UH

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Speaker 1: the so called application program interfaces, which are basically software

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Speaker 1: code that allows one device to talk to another device,

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Speaker 1: or or one program to talk to another program. Oracle

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Speaker 1: sued Google for violating its copyrights and says we're owed

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Speaker 1: something like nine billion with a B dollars. Google says,

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Speaker 1: first of all, you can't copyright this sort of stuff,

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Speaker 1: and second of all, even if you can, there's this

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Speaker 1: doctrine called fair use that would let us use these

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Speaker 1: application program interfaces and that should seld us from from liability.

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Speaker 1: The Court didn't have to take this case. In fact,

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Speaker 1: the Justice Department suggested the Court not take the case,

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Speaker 1: but but they did, and it's gonna be a titanic

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Speaker 1: fight within the tech industry. As you just described it,

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Speaker 1: it's a very complicated case as far as the software,

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Speaker 1: the interface, and the decision here was made by the

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Speaker 1: Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That court reversed

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Speaker 1: the jury finding. That is a specialized court that handles

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Speaker 1: these matters. So now we're gonna have a Supreme Court

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Speaker 1: come in and handle this very technical kind of case,

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Speaker 1: which the expert court in these matters reversed. Yeah, it's

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Speaker 1: gonna be interesting, of course, a Supreme Court that has

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Speaker 1: a number of justices who aren't real tech savvy. But

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Speaker 1: we've seen this before. This is UH with the Federal

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Speaker 1: Circuit is also the court the handled patent cases. The

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Speaker 1: Supreme Court has not been shy and re some years

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Speaker 1: about jumping in and and saying mostly you're being too

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Speaker 1: protective of patent rights. Federal Circuit UH, diving into the

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Speaker 1: technology and dealing with it as best they can. You know,

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Speaker 1: the Supreme Court does think that that it is the

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Speaker 1: one that needs to decide these especially important matters, even

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Speaker 1: if if it means diving into a subject area that

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Speaker 1: they don't have a whole lot of expertise. And I

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Speaker 1: don't envy you being at the oral arguments in this case,

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Speaker 1: because I remember some oral arguments in the past with

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Speaker 1: issues involving technical matters, and I didn't mean to disparase

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Speaker 1: Supreme Court justice is. In addition, Supreme Court reporters, including me,

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Speaker 1: aren't necessarily that tech savvy, So it will be a

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Speaker 1: challenge for all of us to try to understand what's

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Speaker 1: really an issue in in this case and try to

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Speaker 1: figure out how copyright law, which of course was written

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Speaker 1: originally set up not thinking about application program interfaces but

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Speaker 1: thinking more about more conventional words and the like be

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Speaker 1: interesting to see how the court manages to apply the

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Speaker 1: Copyright Act to to this area of computers. What kind

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Speaker 1: of ramifications will this decision have on the tech industry?

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Speaker 1: And they could be pretty significant, even putting aside we're

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Speaker 1: talking about billions of dollars in this case alone, but

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Speaker 1: beyond that, Google's argument is, look, these software code, software

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Speaker 1: interfaces like this have always been freely available. That's that's

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Speaker 1: Google's argument, and without it, innovation is going to suffer

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Speaker 1: because if we can't get access to these things. Uh,

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Speaker 1: they say, we can't build new products that use them.

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Speaker 1: And UH. Oracle makes obviously a different argument where it says, look,

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Speaker 1: we put a lot of money, a lot of work

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Speaker 1: into these things, and we actually would have let Google

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Speaker 1: use our our code. We just wanted them to agree

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Speaker 1: to a license and we wanted them, among other things,

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Speaker 1: to agree that whatever they did with it, it would

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Speaker 1: be compatible with the Java programming language. That is what

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Speaker 1: this is all about. And so if the case that

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Speaker 1: has divided Silicon Valley to different ways of looking at

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Speaker 1: rights to computer code, and it will be uh, probably

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Speaker 1: extremely important for the tech industry going forward. And finally,

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Speaker 1: I want to ask you about the health of Justice

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Speaker 1: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who missed some moral arguments. Until this

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Speaker 1: this year, she had never missed a Supreme Court argument

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Speaker 1: because she was ill. Back in January, she missed a

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Speaker 1: number of days because she was recovering from a cancer

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Speaker 1: treatment of surgery, and she missed a day in this

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Speaker 1: most recent sitting, just one day to arguments where she

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Speaker 1: we were told had the stomach bug. But she was

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Speaker 1: back on the bench of the following week and looked

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Speaker 1: like the same Ruth Bader Ginsburg that we've been used

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Speaker 1: to sing. Thanks Gregg, that's Bloomberg New Supreme Court reporter

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Speaker 1: Greg Store. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast.

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Speaker 1: You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple podcast, SoundCloud,

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Speaker 1: and on bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brasso.

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Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg, the dedded Duck of the