Liberation Day is something very different than the day Germany capitulated, even in the Netherlands where it's mere days apart. Because the German army in the Netherlands surrendered on May 5, 1945. Germany capitulated on May 8.
I would prefer to see us acknowledge openly that today we, who are judges rather than members of Congress, are imposing on a half-century-old statute a meaning of "sex discrimination" that the Congress that enacted it would not have accepted. This is something courts do fairly frequently to avoid statutory obsolescence and concomitantly to avoid placing the entire burden of updating old statutes on the legislative branch. We should not leave the impression that we are merely the obedient servants of the 88th Congress (1963-1965), carrying out their wishes. We are not. We are taking advantage of what the last half century has taught.
I find his attempt to exclude who you're sexually attracted to by reference to an ambulance philosophically extremely unconvincing. Primarily of course for the obvious reasons we've already beaten to death a million times. Even though you may well be able to make a reasonable case that someone back in 1964 didn't think of a particular consequence hardly means it was excluded.
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The second form of interpretation, illustrated by the commonplace local ordinance which commands "no vehicles in the park," is interpretation by unexpressed intent, whereby we understand that although an ambulance is a vehicle, the ordinance was not intended to include ambulances among the "vehicles" forbidden to enter the park. This mode of interpretation received its definitive statement in Blackstone's analysis of the medieval law of Bologna which stated that "whoever drew blood in the streets should be punished with the utmost severity." William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England *60 (1765). Blackstone asked whether the law should have been interpreted to make punishable a surgeon "who opened the vein of a person that fell down in the street with a fit." (Bleeding a sick or injured person was a common form of medical treatment in those days.) Blackstone thought not, remarking that as to "the effects and consequence, or the spirit and reason of the law... the rule is, where words bear either none, or a very absurd signification, if literally understood, we must a little deviate from the received sense of them." Id. *59-60. The law didn't mention surgeons, but Blackstone thought it obvious that the legislators, who must have known something about the medical activities of surgeons, had not intended the law to apply to them. And so it is with ambulances in parks that prohibit vehicles.
But additionally the example is self-defeating. There is something called the EMS Act, which explicitly states that all manner of liability, such as going in parks with a no vehicles sign, doesn't apply to ambulances and emergency aid applied by paramedics. There's no Lesbian Exclusion Act. The apocryphal example about Old England is amusing and (presumably) better illustrates the rhetorical point by not suffering from such a defect, but realistically most of his argument can be summarized as "before the 1980s I was barely aware of homosexuals and neither was anyone else," which may well be true but the whole thing is a red herring. It doesn't actually provide support for the central claim.
I think Der Spiegel is a credible source. But Russia's military being even worse than I anticipated is not a new story. The story is the liberation, the destruction and the mining.
Why exactly the remaining Russian troops packed up and left Trostyanets last Friday remains unclear. Was there an order? Did they just flee the city due to mounting exhaustion and dwindling supplies of munitions? Before they left, the Russians mined the chocolate museum. They had already mined the botanical garden and its Nymph Grotto dating from 1809. At the train station and other locations, they left behind graffiti reading "Zelenskyy is a fag," the same phrase sprayed on a number of walls, or "For the honor of Russia." Or simply a heart next to the word "Russia." From Russia with Love. Trostyanets now looks as though it was descended upon by a horde of teenagers armed with spray cans and tanks.
In my European experience (and other Europeans here feel free to concur or debunk), SNL is one of those American culture elements that has no effect in Europe. I know that SNL is a massive cultural phenomenon in USA, and lots of American cultural phenomena, such as Hollywood movies, rock bands or hamburgers are commonplace in Europe(an awareness) too, but SNL is not among these. Hardly anyone in Europe knows that SNL exists or what it is. Another all-American thing that does not touch Europe at all is Superbowl.
It depends a bit on how broadly you define SNL. The Blues Brothers for example is a beloved movie, and various Tina Fey movies are quite popular as well. I suppose culturally speaking we should simply regard them as a form of Hollywood, but they did come out of SNL.
“The smart road to be built in Põlva is Estonia’s first average speed measurement solution in an open environment,” said Mart Suurkask, the CEO of Bercman Technologies.
The new smart road section is about 2.7 km long with an average speed measurement capacity and includes 14 smart pedestrian crosswalks on Kesk and Jaama streets in Põlva. These pedestrian crosswalk solutions are equipped with number plate recognition cameras to measure the average speed of cars and have signs with changeable information at the start and endpoints of the smart road section.
Gorsuch is crystal clear. A man or a woman is treated in a discriminatory way, which they wouldn't "but for" their sex. Talking about transgender nonsense is nothing but a distraction. Transgender means someone is behaving in a way that's "incorrect" for their sex. Discriminating on the basis of sex is illegal, plain and simple. There wouldn't be any discrimination if there were no sex involved. It's not Gorsuch confusing sex and gender, it's you.
I suppose that depends on your view of what Fox News is. There are at least three of them. There's the website, which is basically a (mediocre) newspaper. There's the TV news, which is fairly crap but not really more so than TV news as a general category (although e.g. DW is definitely better). And as @ersi said, there's that with which Fox News wants to be associated first and foremost: https://www.foxnews.com/shows
So in short, not really, except in the sense that most of them probably don't really give a darn as long as it brings in viewers.
The dissent makes some interesting points, but I just can't agree with the conclusion.
The majority says if words are left out, that's done by the lawmakers on purpose. This is a truism. There's nothing to argue with there. It's self-evident. That's how laws are written so that courts will interpret them in that way. They don't accidentally leave out words.
The dissent says that it makes no sense to leave out those words, that it's judicially practically unenforceable or unapplicable. The majority waves this concern away in a mere few sentences. The dissent seems to make a decent few points in this regard.
But then the dissent says that the court should ignore the clear intent expressed by the text of the law, not by calling it unenforceable gibberish or something along similar lines, but by saying the intent clearly expressed by the text of the law should be ignored in favor of what Breyer thinks would make more sense!
Mainly because of the word helpful. But also note that the intent of the words is something very different than a dumb reading of the literal words, if only because words today mean something different today than they did back in 1760. We're talking about a proper interpretation by experts here, not some dumb computer program.
Needless to say, I'm quite disappointed in more than a few. But specially Thomas...
You're definitely making me curious; I'll have to read or skim it later. But like I wrote yesterday, I've observed that "Alito is perfectly textualist when the outcome is in line with his views." I've observed it less with Thomas; I agree it'd be disappointing but I wouldn't find it surprising.
Surely you know the difference between news programs and punditry?
Perhaps the fact that I explicitly wrote "Fox News opinion shows" might provide a hint that I didn't mean the news desk. But what exactly is your point?
I am talking about how the US works. You can't claim it works in ways it clearly doesn't over decades and decades and decades.
You haven't addressed a single argument. You just handwave about what people supposedly meant in spite of the intent they clearly put in the text. That's philosophically untenable and frivolous anarchy in all but name. And yes, that's legislating instead of interpreting.
Need I repeat (yes, I must! , American Constitutional Law is not a common law system...
That's how the American Constitutional Law system is supposed to work. Holy moly, the reason I wrote common law in the first place is because you claimed I was confusing common law for European law.
Bans on nudity could certainly be challenged on the basis of Gorsuch's but-for-sex analysis.
Setting aside that there doesn't seem to be a relation between public indecency laws and equal employment opportunity, it seems unlikely that anybody wrote their public indecency laws that incompetently in an analogous scenario. But if they did, what's the problem? They'd either decide they'd be better off without them or they'd pass a new ordnance that isn't quite as discriminatory in no time. Chances are the old one with a few words amended or crossed out will suffice. I make this point only to serve as a general remark since there doesn't seem to be any relevance to the matter at hand.
You pretty much seem to just be making up things that you think sound scary, ridiculous or both at this point. There are plenty of laws that are ridiculous and scary.
My "problem" with Gorsuch's decision is probably better given thus: Textualism without originalism verges towards chaotic anarchy,
If the original intent of the text of the law has unintended consequences, they can change it. That's how the common law system is supposed to work. You seem to be overlooking all the ways in which Gorsuch explicitly rejects going any further for exactly that very reason.
My "problem" with Gorsuch's decision is probably better given thus: Textualism without originalism verges towards chaotic anarchy,
There's simply no such thing, ignoring for the sake of brevity examples like Scalia blatantly ignoring the tenets of textualism and originalism with regard to the Second Amendment, as astutely pointed out by @ersi several years ago.[1] Textualism is about the original intent of the words of the law. I'm not convinced originalism is even a real thing. It mostly come across as an excuse some people drag out when they don't like the inescapable conclusion. You'll note Alito is perfectly textualist when the outcome is in line with his views.
1 Of course he very nicely dressed it up in textualist clothing.↵
Does the but-for sex test legalize partial nudity? If not, why?
Attempting to steelman that gets me to something like that a man would be told to put on a damn shirt and a woman might be fired, in which case you might conceivably see it "legalized," meaning as much as not immediate ground for dismissal in and of itself.
If so, why not total nudity? (Are all restrooms to be uni-sexual? All school sports? These are but two areas of custom/law that become problematic under the Gorsuch rubric...)
None of that is a discussion of law. It's a discussion of what law should be. Nor does it even pertain to Title VII! Sex-based discrimination in sports is perfectly legal.
If you think this is in any way relevant you haven't understood a thing. These are examples where sex is the relevant property. Discriminating against you or me because we decide to wear a dress when you wouldn't discriminate against a woman wearing a dress is but-for sex. There is no but-for sex in a freaking hysterectomy, good lord.
I say again that "getting the most out of language" of enacted law is not the job of a Supreme Court Justice... It's not a game of gotch! between the legislative and judicial branches, and -yes, real world consequences matter, even if you insist on calling them "political sensitivities"...
That's the point. Gorsuch' reasoning is a completely value-free, correct interpretation of the law. It doesn't involve any sophistry ("gotchas") and it doesn't involve any political winds. The supposed responses are simply not intelligible. They're bad philosophy, unconnected to logic and reality.
