Instance in which the Claimant has been treated unfavourably in a court where a fair judgment based on the law should have been made.
The presiding judge conducted legal proceedings which supported Amazon. Consequently, the Intellectual Property infringement claims never ceased, even after the lawsuit began. The Claimant had to write further Briefs to submit to the court as Amazon continued to conduct successive acts of torts. As a result of this, the Claimant had to pay a surcharge to her lawyer.
The presiding judge suggested to the Claimant that she may need to reconsider the injunction based on Article 24 of the Antimonopoly Act. In other words, the Claimant was deliberately led to withdraw her claims.
Briefs submitted under the name of the lawyer were in fact written by the Claimant. Because the Claimant started the pro se legal representation, she asked a lawyer to look at the Briefs she had written to determine whether there was anything in them that would be completely wrong to assert whenever she submitted them to the court. Even so, the attitude of the presiding judge had clearly changed since the Claimant dismissed her lawyer and shifted to the pro se legal representation.
The presiding judge, who is a government employee and has been given the sacred trust of the people to protect Japanese law, expressed his view that, ‘The Claimant’s Briefs do not have any legal basis’. He further added that, ‘As expected, there is no way to accept any claims from the Claimant’, implying that a lawsuit made by an amateur who is not a legal expert is not worth addressing in the court.
The Claimant was warned by the presiding judge in the court that, ‘At this rate, I will treat the case as if no claim from the Claimant exists’. If the Claimant’s evidence is not going to be treated as worth taking into consideration based on the judge’s free evaluation of evidence, she has no option but to abandon this court (as the judgment made will be based on unclear criteria) and appeal an omission in a judicial decision to the higher court.
Read about this in more detail: Claimant’s Brief 14 (pp.107-121)
