Advantages of a law license other than the ability to practice law The late Professor Charlotte Striebel was a lawyer if that term means one who is licensed to practice law, but not a lawyer if that term means one who does practice law. She worked for decades as a professor of mathematics at the University of Minnesota and had no interest in practicing law, but for some reason she kept her license current. That means attending annual continuing legal education events, and paying license fees. Are there some advantages to keeping such a license without having any interest in working as a lawyer?
If you stay licensed, you have the option to enter the practice of law in the future with no administrative hassles. In contrast, if you let your license lapse, you could have to study for and take the bar exam over again, go through an arduous background check known as a character and fitness review (reviewing your entire adult life), and face months of delay and significant expenditures of money to practice law again. The character and fitness review also isn't just a time and money saver. Once you are admitted, you can only have your licensed revoked or suspended for doing something that violates professional ethics after you are admitted to practice. When you apply to the practice of law initially, you can be denied the right to practice law for bad characters for all manner of things in the broad discretion of the licensing officials. There are many kinds of conduct that can't be considered after you are admitted that can be used to deny you a license to practice law in the first place. Effectively, you are doing the continuing education courses and paying the fees to keep the option of returning to the profession trouble free, open. For example, I continue to be admitted to the practice of law in New York State, even though I no longer take cases there on a regular basis, so that in the one or two cases every few years that I do have in that state, I do not need to get a pro hac vice admission for a single case in that state, and so that if I ever want to relocate to New York State to practice law actively there, I can without a minimum of bureaucratic hurdles to doing so. Continuing education courses are also tax deductible in most cases. Even if I was no longer actively practicing in either of the states where I am admitted to the practice of law, keeping the licenses in force would also allow me to apply for admission to the practice of law in many other states on a streamlined basis available for currently licensed lawyers who have been admitted to practice for at least five years. Some states also allow you to go on &quot;inactive&quot; status with reduced fees and continuing education requirements, and then return to active practice again, by paying the fees and starting to take regular continuing education classes again, which makes this affordable during a period when you are exploring another career, considering an early retirement, or taking time off to raise kids. In New York State, lawyers also have the ability to conduct certain kinds of real estate transactions for their clients without a real estate broker's license. Once you are admitted to practice you are also grandfathered in if the requirements to be admitted to the practice of law change in the future. For example, suppose New York State required a one year apprenticeship before you could practice independently starting in 2021. If you were admitted to practice in 2020, you would be exempt from that requirement.
You've tagged this as both united-states and european-union, so this answer is about the United States. Before you can &quot;license&quot; someone to do something, you must first have the legal right to prevent them from doing it. Otherwise, your purported &quot;license&quot; is just a worthless piece of paper (technically, you might be able to sell those pieces of paper notwithstanding their lack of validity, so I suppose they wouldn't be completely worthless). If we imagine that the subject of a biography or autobiography wants to control the publication of that biography, there are a number of legal grounds that might be cited, depending on the circumstances: Copyright: The person who actually wrote the biography (who may or may not be the subject!) can prevent others from making copies or derivative works of it, as well as several other rights enumerated in 17 USC 106. Most publication agreements involve signing an exclusive license with the publisher. If the author has not signed such a license, then the biography is not going to be published in the first place. Regardless, copyright only exists once the work is &quot;fixed in a tangible medium&quot; (e.g. saved to a hard drive, written down on a piece of paper, etc.). If it's still &quot;in your head,&quot; then you don't own anything. If the subject and author are different people, then the subject does not have any rights here at all; copyright belongs exclusively to the author. Furthermore, copyright only protects the individual work. It does not prevent someone else from writing a different biography from scratch, so long as this second biography is original and does not reuse any content from the first biography. The underlying facts belong to no one. Privacy rights are generally handled as a tort under state law. If the subject is a public figure (i.e. the sort of person who's likely to have a biography written about them) then privacy rights tend to be rather limited. However, they are not nonexistent, and invasion-of-privacy claims are occasionally raised, usually in cases where highly personal, sensitive information is disclosed against the will of the subject. This may also become relevant if the author of the biography obtains information in an illegal fashion such as by hacking or physical trespass. However, in most cases, the content would need to be pretty far beyond the pale before this would have a realistic chance of succeeding. Personality rights are usually considered an extension or variety of privacy rights. In general, they allow the subject to prevent their name from being associated with a commercial endeavor without their permission. However, it is likely that the First Amendment would bar the application of personality rights to a biography, unless the publisher tried to misrepresent a ghostwritten work as an autobiography without the consent of the subject. Libel is a tort under state law. Libel laws in the US are extremely limited, and the subject would need to establish at least all of the following in order to succeed (or else the claim is barred by the First Amendment): The defendant published a statement. A reasonable person would interpret that statement as factual (and not an opinion, puffery, etc.). The statement is materially false (i.e. the &quot;gist or sting&quot; of the statement is false, regardless of whether it is technically 100% accurate). The statement harmed the reputation of the plaintiff. The defendant knew the statement was false, or made no serious effort to verify it (&quot;actual malice&quot;). Not required unless the plaintiff is a public figure, but the subject of a biography probably will be a public figure. There may be additional requirements depending on the state, and the defendant will probably try to file an anti-SLAPP motion if state law allows for it. Of these four rights, copyright is by far the most commonly &quot;licensed,&quot; followed by personality rights. Nobody gives out licenses to commit libel or invade their privacy. That leaves us with two ways of licensing your (auto)biography: Actually write it yourself, and sell it to a publishing company. You will give them a copyright license as part of the process (in exchange for royalties and an advance). Convince a publishing company to hire a ghostwriter for you, and then license your likeness to them. The public will be told that you &quot;wrote&quot; the book, and you will promote it in exactly the same way as if you did write it. Neither of these options will prevent someone else from coming along and writing their own biography about you, of course.
If you received a copy of a copyrighted work under a particular license in the past, that work is licensed to you under the terms of that license. If the copyright holder stops offering the work under BSD terms, that does not lessen the fact that you already did receive the work under BSD terms. The copyright holder may choose to stop distributing new copies to other people under the old license, but the old license grant offered to you in the past will persist, unless either the license expires, or the licencor explicitly revokes your license grant. The BSD license (and any OSI-approved license) does not have an expiration date, so we do not need to worry about the first possibility. A license can be revoked only if either the terms of the license explicitly allow the licencor to do so, or the license was granted in such a way that the licencor received no economic consideration for the license grant. The BSD license is silent on revocability, so we must see whether there is economic consideration involved. According to Jacobsen v. Katzer, a public open-source license grant may have economic consideration, even absent any exchange of money: Traditionally, copyright owners sold their copyrighted material in exchange for money. The lack of money changing hands in open source licensing should not be presumed to mean that there is no economic consideration, however. There are substantial benefits, including economic benefits, to the creation and distribution of copyrighted works under public licenses that range far beyond traditional license royalties. For example, program creators may generate market share for their programs by providing certain components free of charge. Similarly, a programmer or company may increase its national or international reputation by incubating open source projects. Improvement to a product can come rapidly and free of charge from an expert not even known to the copyright holder. (See also Are licenses irrevocable by default? on OpenSource.SE.) Thus, there is a strong possibility that there is consideration involved in your case, and the licencor may not be able to revoke the license already granted to you.
Short Answer The entire license could be ruled invalid and therefore unenforceable. Explanation Two legal principles at play in jimsug's answer might be: Vagueness Doctrine Overbreadth Doctrine Either or both of which might be sufficient for a judge to waive enforcement of any provisions that relate to the terms "good" or "evil." An interesting side effect of this might be that unless the principle of severability were applied to the JSlint license, then the license could be considered completely invalid due solely to the addition of the words "good" and "evil." A judge would have to affirmatively impose severability because the license itself does not assert it.
how would this differ between say ArXiv which is open access, and a publication that is pay-only, like Elsevier or Nature? It wouldn't. But if the equation is the creation of the author of some publication, as in the author is expressing some unique mathematical expression, obviously the publication should be referenced. But is referencing enough? Are there additional rights one must obtain from the publication and/or author in order to show this content? Laws of nature, including purported laws of nature, are not protected by copyright. So, usually, key equations in an academic paper aren't protected by copyright law. Referencing the work is important as a matter of academic ethics, but is legally irrelevant. Copying of exposition by the author beyond laws of nature is permitted as fair use if it is limited to quotations necessary for academic discussion and criticism, but copying of an entire work would not be permissible fair use in most cases and would constitute copyright infringement. Of course, there is a large gray area between those extremes.
Both Bob and Charles are liable for infringement in the US. The fact that Charles had no idea that Bob was an infringer is not a defense, but it mitigates the statutory damages consequences for him. Either party can negotiate with Alice after the fact for a license, and Alice can grant either party but not the other permission to copy. The terms of the license that Alice gives Bob could either allow CCo reposting, or some more restrictive redistribution right. If the license requires a notice prohibiting further redistribution and Bob omits that notification, Bob will have breached the terms of the license in omitting the notification, so we're back to square 1. If Alice fails to specify a no-redistribution notification condition on Bob's reposting, Alice may have granted an implied license to the world, a matter which has to be determined by the courts.
Lawyers are useful in litigation the way engineers are useful construction or doctors are useful in surgery The know what they’re doing and have done it many times before: you haven’t. In your particular situation your lawyer can advise you if you actually have a case worth pursuing and the best way to do so. In most jurisdictions lawyers cannot represent you in small claims court but they can handle your application and coach you in advance. As to your final question: lawyers are professionals and it’s frankly insulting to suggest that a professional would deliberately mislead for personal gain - the overwhelming majority won’t and the tiny fraction that will are criminals.
In modern usage, it is far better to replace a will then to create a codicil primarily because there is only one document to verify the veracity of. As you say, it would be just as easy to print off a new will. However, the ease of printing off a new one is a relatively recent technological development. When wills were typed on a typewriter or, in even earlier times, handwritten, the advantages of a codicil are much more apparent; particularly when you pay your lawyer by the hour.