Is there legal precedent for restricting US citizens from interacting with each other on private property during a pandemic? Many states (for example, Washington) around the US have issued an executive order prohibiting their residents from interacting with other citizens face-to-face, unless its a part of an "essential" activity: All people in Washington State shall immediately cease participating in all public and private gatherings and multi-person activities for social, spiritual and recreational purposes, regardless of the number of people involved, except as specifically identified herein. Such activity includes, but is not limited to, community, civic, public, leisure, faith-based, or sporting events; parades; concerts; festivals; conventions; fundraisers; and similar activities. This prohibition also applies to planned wedding and funeral events. This prohibition shall remain in effect until midnight on April 6, 2020, unless extended beyond that date. Is there precedent in US law for such a restriction? Or perhaps someone already tried to challenge this rule during the current pandemic? Preventing citizens from going to each others home for a visit seems like the ultimate form of restrictions, so it would be interesting to see if it ever held up in court.
I think the Washington law and order is fairly clear: you must stay home unless you are engaged in certain allowed activities. The underlying law, RCW 43.06.220(h) empowers issuing an order prohibiting "Such other activities as he or she reasonably believes should be prohibited to help preserve and maintain life, health, property or the public peace". Therefore I can walk my dog. When I do, there are a lot of people also out walking their dogs, so that provides a letter-of-the-law permitted exception to the stay-at-home order. Nothing in the order specifically addresses the situation where you pause your dog-walk to talk to a neighbor (the "appropriate social distancing" sub-rule only applies to recreational departures from your home). It is well-established that the central legal issue is what the "compelling government interest" is, and whether these restrictions fail on grounds of narrow-tailoring or least-restrictiveness. The failure to include "go to your brother's place for lunch, provided you follow appropriate social distancing guidelines" as a permitted activity is a candidate for not being least-restrictive. The problem is that the courts will not engage in an infinite regress of second-guessings about whether certain measures are "truly necessary". There is a SCOTUS challenge where the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld that's state's order, but a SCOTUS order requires the state to reply to a petition by Monday. The "status quo" is that these orders are legal, until someone constructs a compelling argument that they are not, and that matter is then resolved in favor of petitioner by SCOTUS (which has not happened). So far, governors have prevailed at the state level.
With respect to disciplining its students and employees, a private school can basically do whatever it wants. There's more freedom to do so with respect to students than with employees, who have greater protections derived from anti-discrimination laws, collective-bargaining agreements, and the like. If a private school wants to impose a No Burger Tuesdays and a complete ban on political activity, that's probably going to be permissible. The First Amendment will protect the school's right to associate with only those who meet its standards, as absurd as those standards may be. Again, there are exceptions to this rule, like Title IX, which requires equal educational opportunities regardless of sex, but they don't have much bearing on your question. Even for a public school, there will be quite a bit of latitude here, because these rules don't actually regulate off-campus conduct. If a student wants to attend an off-campus public gathering, the campus police aren't going to lock him in his room or arrest him for leaving campus. The rule is simply that if you attend a public gathering off campus, you may not come back on campus afterward to threaten the lives of your classmates.
united-states Once a body is cremated it is generally no longer subject to the laws related to dead bodies. But the disposition of a corpse that is not cremated varies greatly from one U.S. state to another. The Washington College of Law has a website called the State Burial Laws Project that summarized the relevant laws for many U.S. states. As the example of New Hampshire illustrates, however, lots of those laws pertain to preservation of interred remains once they are lawfully interred (i.e. to the preservation and protection of burials). Another multi-state survey has been prepared by Nolo. For example, in Colorado: Where can bodies be buried in Colorado? Most bodies are buried in established cemeteries, but there are no state laws in Colorado that prohibit burial on private property. Burials on private property must be recorded with the county clerk within 30 days. (Colorado Revised Statutes § 25-2-111.) The county recorder or coroner should be able to supply you with a form you can use for this purpose. The funeral director or person who has custody of a dead body must get authorization to dispose of the body (including burial or cremation) before doing so, usually from a county health unit or coroner. (Colorado Revised Statutes § 25-2-111.) Note that local governments may have additional rules governing private burials. Before burying a body on private land or establishing a family cemetery, you should check county and city zoning rules. Where can we store or scatter ashes after cremation in Colorado? In Colorado, there are few limits on where you may keep or scatter ashes. Ashes may be stored in a crypt, niche, grave, or container at home. If you wish to scatter them, you have many options. Cremation renders ashes harmless, so there is no public health risk involved in scattering ashes. Use common sense and refrain from scattering ashes in places where they would be obvious to others. Scattering ashes in an established scattering garden. Many cemeteries provide gardens for scattering ashes. If you're interested, ask the cemetery for more information. Scattering ashes on private land. You are allowed to scatter ashes on your own private property. If you want to scatter ashes on someone else's private land, it's wise to get permission from the landowner. Scattering ashes on public land. You may wish to check both city and county regulations and zoning rules before scattering ashes on local public land, such as in a city park. However, many people simply proceed as they wish, letting their best judgment be their guide. Scattering ashes on federal land. Officially, you should request permission before scattering ashes on federal land. As with local or state land, however, you will probably encounter no resistance if you conduct the scattering ceremony quietly and keep the ashes well away from trails, roads, facilities, and waterways. You can find guidelines for scattering ashes on the websites for some national parks. For example, the website of Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park offers a downloadable application for a permit to scatter ashes in the park. Scattering ashes at sea. The federal Clean Water Act requires that cremated remains be scattered at least three nautical miles from land. If the container will not easily decompose, you must dispose of it separately. The EPA does not permit scattering at beaches or in wading pools by the sea. Finally, you must notify the EPA within 30 days of scattering ashes at sea. The Clean Water Act also governs scattering in inland waters such as rivers or lakes. For inland water burial, you may be legally required to obtain a permit from the state agency that manages the waterway. Scattering ashes by air. While there are no state laws on the matter, federal aviation laws do prohibit dropping any objects that might cause harm to people or property. The U.S. government does not consider cremains to be hazardous material; all should be well so long as you remove the ashes from their container before scattering. Colorado's laws are mostly aimed at preventing a body lawfully buried in a backyard from leading to a potential criminal investigation of a death that did not involve a crime by making it easy to match the body to a death certificate. But, most jurisdictions regulate the means by which bodies can be disposed of to some degree. For example, outside San Marcos, Texas, and possibly a few other isolated places, a practice that is traditional in some kinds of Tibetan Buddhism and among the Parsi people of India is called &quot;sky burial&quot; is not permitted. Historical Note In the early Neolithic era (e.g., in the Vinca culture), dead bodies were frequently buried underneath the decedent's house. In the early Bronze Age, cremation became a litmus test for Indo-European linguistic and cultural expansion in Europe, Central Asia, West Asia, and South Asia, although this practice faded after many centuries when this was the norm, and internment (i.e. burial) came to be the norm again. Cremation then tended to become more common in urbanized areas starting in the classical Greco-Roman era in Europe. This urban-rural divide between cremation and internment rates largely persists to the present, driven by the scarcity of land and the tendency of people not to live in the same place for multiple generations in urban areas, and the abundance of land and stability of families over many generations in rural areas where farming is predominant. But internment also tends to be less common in places with permafrost or ground that is frozen for much of the year, in places with very thin soils over bedrock, and in places with stable populations (e.g. Louisiana) that are immersed in wetlands where dry ground is scarce and rot sets in very quickly (crypts and cremation are more common in these places).
Can a shopowner in Thailand ban someone from entering their shop on the grounds of their citizenship? The first tweet, explains the context properly: I’m at my local hospital this afternoon to get a medical certificate. My work permit expires soon and so I need to run around getting all the documents in order. At the hospital they wanted to check my passport before letting me in to see if I had been abroad recently. Thailand has been very popular with visitors for decades and if laws existed that discriminated against foreigners this would be commonly known. So in this case the 'discrimination' probably not because of citizenship, but more about a faulty assumption that the virus is spread by foreigners. This will have nothing to do with Thai law. The (tweet) OP quotes only another persons claim. The OP states in the first tweet that they checked his passport only to see if he was abroad recently. So he didn't share the same experience of the American. Based on that, this second hand source (that can't be verified) is probably unreliable. Due to the present (global) uncertainties, caused by the Coronavirus, one should look at the whole picture. 2020-02-04: Coronavirus: Chinese targeted as Italians panic - BBC News In Italy and elsewhere, panic is spreading much faster than the coronavirus itself. Chinese businesses are empty, shopkeepers are shutting down and Chinese nationals are being targeted. At a bar beside the Trevi fountain, a notice was put up banning customers from China. So the the situation described by the original (tweet) OP is understandable, but the quoted (but not varified) second hand source as well as the events in Italy are not. The incidents have prompted condemnation from the Italian authorities. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte reprimanded the regional governors, telling them that they were not competent to make such a call and that nothing justified such fear. Discrimination, solely due to citizenship, would be against Human Rights prevention of discrimination. Special cases may exist for prices that are subsidized and thus only for residents. Dual pricing was common in the Czech Republic until 1999, when it was ruled illegal (but still persisted). Then a foreign resident had to supply proof of residency to avoid paying the higher price. 2007: Illegal practice of dual pricing persists in Czech Republic At the time we assumed that this was legal (it was certainly understandable), but it seems that was not the case. Are the &quot;Human Rights prevention of discrimination&quot; written down somewhere? Also, who enforce them? Universal Declaration of Human | United Nations Human Rights Enforcement Mechanisms of the United Nations | ESCR-Net European Convention on Human Rights - Wikipedia European Court of Human Rights How these international laws/conventions are implemented into national laws will differ from country to country. For Germany they are anchored into the constitution: Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany Article 25 Primacy of international law The general rules of international law shall be an integral part of federal law. They shall take precedence over the laws and directly create rights and duties for the inhabitants of the federal territory. and are enforced by the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) and can be passed on to the European Court of Justice (or European Court of Human Rights) should the need arise. Thailand: Part of Section 30 of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand 2007: Unjust discrimination against a person on the grounds of the difference in origin, race, language, sex, age, disability, physical or health condition, personal status, economic or social standing, religious belief, education or constitutionally political view, shall not be permitted.
"Public space" is not a relevant criteria when considering trespass or other crimes/torts against property. The relevant criteria is who owns it and what they allow you to do on it. All land in the USA is owned by someone. That someone may be a government; that does not make it a public space - Camp David is owned by the US government; it is certainly not public. The owner of the land can decide (subject to the law) who has access to their land and in what circumstances. If they erect a fence then they are saying "You cannot access my land here" - if you ignore this then you are trespassing. This is true even if there are legitimate ways to access the land i.e. there is a place where there isn't a fence; to avoid trespass you would have to access the land from there. If you think of this in terms of a public building like a courthouse you are free to enter through the unlocked front doors but not by climbing through a window. The trespass is in the act of crossing the fence - that is the act that you have been implicitly denied permission to do. Being on one side or the other is not trespass. For the specific image that you show it is quite likely that those roads are owned by different people - the highway is probably owned by the state while the cul-de-sac is a local government road.
This is known as the "ministerial exception". Because the Free Exercise and Estalishment clauses of the First Amendment prohibit the government from interfering with religion, the government cannot override a doctrine that contradicts the teachings of a religion (so women and gays cannot sue the Catholic church for not being hirable as priests). In Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, an individual taught classes and led prayer at a religous school, but was fired ultimately due to a disability (narcolepsy). The Lutheran church does not have any known doctrine condemning narcolepsy: but it was unanimously ruled that "the Establishment Clause prevents the Government from appointing ministers, and the Free Exercise Clause prevents it from interfering with the freedom of religious groups to select their own". Thus the church was legally permitted to fire the individual due to her disability.
A private venue normally has discretion over who may attend their premises, as long as it is not because of membership in a protected class under anti-discrimination law. Note that the communication, as quoted, did not say that the banned person was a threat, but only that one of the performers felt uncomfortable. I do not think that the banned person has any legal recourse, unless they can plausibly assert that this is a case of unlawful discrimination, which the question does not suggest.
Art. 25 of the Indian Constitution says (in part) Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion. But, Nothing in this article shall affect the operation of any existing law or prevent the State from making any law regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political or other secular activity which may be associated with religious practice; providing for social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus. The preamble does also declare that India is a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic, but this is not a clearly-enforceable article. There is no legal requirement that government action be entirely devoid of consideration for religion. What the law says is that the government must respect the rights of individuals to practice their own religion, but that does not preclude favoring a particular religion, e.g. using Hindu texts in official contexts. So far, the courts have not rules that government action must be entirely devoid of religious reference (for example the various Hindu family laws vs. Muslim family laws are not unconstitutional).