Nicole Raz
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON (WMAL) — Does canceling the Redskins’ trademarks infringe on the team’s free speech? That was one of the main questions in a federal court today for a Redskins summary judgement hearing, ending with Judge Gerald Bruce Lee saying he’d issue a written ruling in “due course.”
Lead attorney for the Redskins Bob Raskopf, argued that the Redskins trademark is private speech. “Of course, nobody sees a Coke can and sees the government speaking,” Raskopf said, adding that therefore the trademark has free speech protections.
The two sides of the argument are at a stalemate; the lead attorney for Blackhorse Jeff Lopez argued the opposite. The Redskins trademark is federal speech, he argued, by the fact that it is a government endorsed mark.
“The government is just as visible in the Redskins trademark as the government was visible in the confederate license plates in the Sons of Confederate Veterans case vs. Texas case last week,” Lopez said.
The hearing took a heated turn when the debate centered around whether the Redskins name is disparaging to Native Americans.
Raskopf argued that when the trademark was registered between 1967 and 1990 there was not a “substantial composite” of Native Americans who felt opposed to the name. He showed a photograph from a Native American newspaper in 1978 showing that reservation Little League teams referred to their own teams as Redskins.
In return, Lopez argued that the name Redskins has already been proven as a racial slur and it does not matter that there that some Native Americans in the Southwest who still use the name.
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