U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards
Edwards was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals in February 1980 and became chief judge on September 15, 1994. Before joining the court, he taught at Harvard Law School and served as neutral labor arbiter in a number of major collective bargaining agreements during the 1970s. He also was chairman of the board of directors for Amtrak from 1978-1980. He graduated from Cornell University in 1962 and the University of Michigan Law School in 1965.
Judge Stephen F. Williams
Williams was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals in June 1986. Before joining the court, Williams was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and also taught at the University of Colorado School of Law. He graduated from Yale University in 1958 and received his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1961.
Judge Douglas Ginsburg
Ginsburg is the resident expert on antitrust law for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He served in the Justice Department's antitrust division for four years under President Ronald Reagan and was chief of the division for two of those years. Ginsburg, like at least three of the other appeals judges, has a reputation as a conservative jurist skeptical of government activism. He was graduated from Cornell University in 1970 and from the University of Chicago Law School in 1973. After law school, he held two federal court clerkships and then worked from 1975 to 1983 as a professor at Harvard Law School. He was appointed to the federal appeals bench in October 1986.
In November 1987, Ginsburg was forced to withdraw his nomination by President Ronald Reagan over his admission that he had used marijuana in the 1960s and 1970s while a college student and during his tenure as a Harvard Law School professor.
Judge David B. Sentelle
Sentelle was appointed a United States Circuit Judge in October 1987. He is the presiding judge of the division that oversees the appointment of independent counsels, including the appointment of Whitewater counsel Ken Starr. Sentelle joined the appeals court after serving as a judge on the U.S. District Court for Western District of North Carolina, where he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. Sentelle also has engaged in private practice, served as assistant U.S. attorney in Charlotte, North Carolina and served as state district judge in North Carolina. He is a 1968 graduate of the University of North Carolina Law School.
Judge A. Raymond Randolph
Randolph was appointed in 1990. He worked in the solicitor general's office from 1970 to 1977. He then worked as assistant attorney general in Utah, New Mexico and Montana and was a partner with the firm of Pepper, Hamilton & Scheetz before his judicial appointment. He received an bachelor's degree from Drexel University in 1966 and he attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School, graduating in 1969.
Judge Judith W. Rogers
Rogers was appointed to the court in 1994. She is a former trial attorney for the Justice Department and a specialist in criminal law. Rogers served in a number of positions in the District of Columbia government before being appointed in 1983 as associate judge of the D.C. Court of Appeals, where she served as chief judge from 1988 until her appointment to the appeals court. She is a graduate of Radcliffe College and Harvard Law School and also has a master of laws degree from the University of Virginia Law School.
Judge David S. Tatel
Tatel was appointed in 1994. He was engaged in private practice since 1979 at the Washington, D.C. firm Hogan and Hartson, heading the firm's education group. Before that, Tatel was involved in civil rights law in Chicago and later for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1963 and the University of Chicago Law School in 1966.
Other key players
David C. Frederick
Frederick is an assistant to the solicitor general who joined the office in 1996. He has argued 11 cases in the Supreme Court, and has drafted briefs for eight others. Before coming to the solicitor general's office, he was the counselor to the inspector general, where he investigated allegations of wrongdoing within the FBI crime laboratory. Frederick is a Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford and a law degree from the University of Texas.
Bill Gates
Gates, 44, co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with Paul Allen after dropping out of Harvard University. The company's success has made him the world's richest man. He did not appear as a witness in the trial, but he was argumentative with government lawyers in his videotape deposition, excerpts of which were shown at the trial. In January 2000, he promoted Steve Ballmer, a friend from Harvard, to president of Microsoft and gave Ballmer the daily duties of running the company. Gates then assumed the additional title of "chief software architect" for the company. Gates has a reputation as a fierce competitor and businessman who has little tolerance for people who don't keep up with the rapid pace of his thinking.
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson
Jackson was the trial judge in the Microsoft case and while no longer directly involved in the case, he and his ruling that Microsoft should be broken into two companies will continue to play a role. Jackson gave several post-trial interviews that Microsoft plans to use as evidence he was biased in the trial. In a legal filing, Microsoft said that recently published interviews "raised profound doubts about his impartiality and the fairness of the trial he conducted." In some of his comments to reporters and authors writing books on the case, Jackson compared Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to Napoleon and suggested Microsoft officials were not "grown-ups.
Jackson also said the appeals court judges, who overruled him on a previous issue in the Microsoft case, were "supercilious" and that they "embellish law with unnecessary and, in many cases, superficial scholarship." Jackson didn't shy away from speaking his mind during the trial. When Microsoft lawyers complained that the judge was allowing the government to show too many excerpts from Bill Gates' videotaped depositions, Jackson said, "I think your problem is with your witness." Jackson was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and previously presided over the 1990 cocaine trial of Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry.
Charles James
A Washington antitrust lawyer, James is the Bush administration's nominee to head the antitrust division. Microsoft will probably have an easier time dealing with him than his predecessor, Joel Klein, as James stressed in a television interview last year that consumers had benefited from the ubiquity of Microsoft's Windows software platform. James is currently a partner in the law firm Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue and previously served in the administration of Bush's father as a deputy assistant attorney general and the acting head of the antitrust division. He also worked for the Federal Trade Commission in the FTC's merger enforcement program. He received a bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University and his law degree from George Washington University.
Jeffrey P. Minear
Minear is the senior litigation counsel and assistant to the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice with responsibility for Supreme Court litigation and for overseeing the U.S. participation in all Supreme Court original actions. He has been at the solicitor general's office for more than 16 years and is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's law school. He attended the University of Utah and received his law degree from the University of Michigan. In arguing the Microsoft case, he takes over from David Boies, the high-profile outside counsel hired by the Justice Department to argue the trial case. Boies also worked for Vice President Al Gore's campaign during the Florida recount last year.
John Roberts Jr.
Roberts represents the 19 states that are suing Microsoft. Currently, he is a partner at Hogan and Hartson heading up the firm's appellate practice group. Before joining the firm, Roberts was an associate counsel at the White House in the Reagan administration. He also left the firm in 1989 to join the Bush administration as a deputy solicitor general. He was nominated by Bush to the District of Columbia Circuit in 1992 but his nomination failed to come to a Senate vote in that election year. Roberts clerked with Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and has argued more than 30 cases before the Supreme Court. Roberts graduated from Harvard 1976 and Harvard Law school in 1979.
Richard Urowsky
Urowsky, an attorney with the New York firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, is arguing Microsoft's case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Urowsky helped argue the Microsoft case during the trial and often sparred with Judge Jackson. He also helped create the 1995 consent decree between Microsoft and the Justice Department. He received both his bachelor's and law degree from Yale University and also holds a philosophy degree from Oxford University. He joined Sullivan & Cromwell in 1973 and has been a partner since 1980, specializing in antitrust, securities and tax litigation.
The Project to Promote Competition & Innovation in the Digital Age is a group that formed to support the government's position in the antitrust trial. High-profile members of ProComp include long-time Microsoft critics Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corp. and Netscape Communications. It has filed a brief with the appeals court that was signed by Ken Starr, the former Whitewater independent counsel and a former member of the D.C. circuit appeals court, Walter E. Dellinger III, a Clinton administration solicitor general, and Robert H. Bork, a Nixon administration solicitor general whose nomination to the Supreme Court by President Reagan was blocked by the Senate.
The association is pro-Microsoft trade group that filed a brief supporting Microsoft. Signers of the brief included Lloyd N. Cutler, who served as White House counsel in the Clinton and Carter administrations, C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel in the administration of former President Bush, and Griffin B. Bell, who was the attorney general in the Carter administration.
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