Simon Tam didn’t think it would be a big deal when he applied for trademark protection on the name of his band, The Slants. It was 2011, and the band—a dance-rock group whose members are all Asian-American—had been getting some buzz. A lawyer buddy told Tam he’d do the application, saying the process would take a couple hundred bucks and six months, tops.
“Things turned out a little bit different,” Tam told Reason several years later, on the eve of Supreme Court oral arguments over his trademark case. In January, shortly after Tam sat down with Reason TV’s Meredith Bragg, the Supreme Court heard The Slants’ case, now known as Lee v. Tam. The justices appeared skeptical of the government’s argument, pushing back on the law’s vagueness, its circular reasoning, and its uneven application, suggesting that the Court might overturn the 71-year-old rule standing between The Slants and their trademark.
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