For the past 200 years, the answer has been: of course not. The job of a judge is to rely on the evidence at hand, the arguments put forth by lawyers and the testimony of expert witnesses; they themselves are supposed to "specialize" only in impartiality and in the legal statutes which apply to a particular case. From this perspective, how different, really, is the Microsoft case from any other of the thousands of cases that cycle through the federal courts each year? What makes it so distinguishable as to require a special arena in which to be judged?

More disturbing still is the sort of "revolving door" syndrome that specialty judges and courts would most likely exhibit. The "revolving door" is dubbed as such due to the manner in which people tend to move between the top levels of industry and the regulatory departments of the executive branch; for instance, the president's appointees to the Treasury Department tend to be top business leaders. Problems arise when those appointees then have to help control and regulate an industry to which they are often inextricably linked.

Those judges who would sit on "special" business and technology courts would need to have experience in those fields; otherwise the purpose of the court would be defeated. Do we really want to risk bringing judges to a circuit where they will have to pass judgement on former employers, coworkers and rivals? It would be incredibly foolish to risk the impartiality of the judicial system in such a fashion.

So unless the federal government can formulate a system that is able to account for and overcome the problem of objectivity--and until the time that the demand for such courts becomes a real concern--Microsoft and other technology companies will have to learn how to plead their case within the confines of the current system. And if Microsoft couldn't win the case playing with the same rules as everybody else, perhaps they deserved to lose.

Alixandra E. Smith '02, a Crimson editor, is a government concentrator in Kirkland House.