Why do the majority of states require you to publish your name change? I know that there are some states, like Oregon, which are easing up on this. If you are transgender, or have been the victim of abuse or crime, you should be able to change your name in private. At the same time, are they trying to make it hard for us so that if we were trying to hide our tracks from the law, people would have a chance to object? I wouldn't want the whole world to know I was transgender, no way. Why can we not do a thorough criminal and background check on every person who wants to have their name change, similar to what an employer or volunteer coordinator might do before hiring or allowing you to volunteer?
Name-changing can facilitate escaping liability, so that e.g. if you are liable to someone for $20,000 and you change your name, you may be able to evade that liability. If a name change is made public, then others who have a legal claim against you are officially put on notice that Elmore James is now known as Lee Smith, and paperwork naming the respondent can be properly filled out. A criminal background check will not catch fact such as that you earlier caused damage to another person's property.
If I want to protest for or against President Trump and decide to wear a Trump mask, isn't that speech protected by the first amendment? Probably. The matter of intent, in any event, is for a court to decide (if the prosecutor determines that the question should even be presented to a court). For example, someone seeking to rob a bank in a mask would probably fall afoul of this law, and it's not likely that using a mask of a political figure would enable a successful first-amendment defense. For a political protestor, it could be easy to show that the intent was to make a political statement and not to conceal identity, in which case it would not be necessary to consider the constitutional question, for a critical element of the crime would be missing. That is, if you say "I wasn't trying to hide my identity," and the court believes you, then you haven't violated the statute. That is a separate question from whether the statute is constitutional. For the law itself to be unconstitutional, it would have to be unconstitutional in every application, generally. If some applications of the law are unconstitutional, the law could stand, but prosecutions for the unconstitutional application would not succeed.
If you are worried that some secret will become public, you should find and meet with an attorney, not a financial adviser or other nonlawyer. Your attorney is able to shield your secret information from disclosure in ways other professionals cannot. Raise any credit score issues you're concerned about. In general, the public has a right to access judicial records. See Nixon v. Warner Communications, Inc., 435 US 589, 597 (1978) (noting that the right is rarely litigated and not clearly defined). That right is not absolute; some records can be sealed, which means that the public can't read them. Local rules govern when that happens. I don't think the existence of a civil lawsuit could be made secretly except in special circumstances. Likewise, the plaintiff usually must identify herself, except in special circumstances. A plaintiff should assume that everything about the lawsuit--who filed it, against whom, what evidence arises, the trial, and who wins and loses--will be public.
Can you unambiguously, legally, and conclusively determine what is and is not a "porn site"? I'm sure many are easy... but what about that "Swimsuit modeling" site, or the "Artistic Nudes" site featuring classic French Renaissance paintings? There will always be a grey area. What makes a "site" in a legal sense? Consider all the blog sites filled with user generated content: If just a few pages out of tens-of-thousands are hardcore, indisputable porn, would you require the entire domain to be classified XXX, even if 99% of its content is completely innocent? Who would enforce this? Are you proposing an "Internet Police" force to review all new domain names and their content before they get approved? That is called "Prior Restraint on Free Speech", and is established law. Suppose a site does get approved, then immediately changes the content of their pages from Cooking Recipes to hard-core porn. Who is going to review and approve every update to every website, when sites are updated constantly?! Maybe you're proposing that any individual who finds porn on a .ORG site has the right to sue for damages? This would likely clog the courts with endless vigilante lawsuits about what content belongs on which domain. This is a flat out horrible, poorly thought out idea.
No, you are not obligated to provide the requested information. You're out of trial court and into the court of appeals, where the civil discovery rules have basically no effect. If the case gets kicked back to the trial court, you would likely be required to respond truthfully. To cover your bases and look responsible, the most proper thing to do would probably be to respond to the discovery requests, but answer with nothing but an objection to the requests on the basis that the Rules of Civil Procedure do not apply after the case has been dismissed. At that point, the burden is on the other party to make a motion to compel, which he probably won't do. And if he does, I'd expect the court to deny it summarily based on the dismissal.
"How can these things be compatible at all"? The law is that prostitution isn't illegal, which means prostitutes cannot be thrown into jail, they cannot be blackmailed by customers or police officers, for example. This protects and is intended to protect the prostitute. If a business owner tried what you suggest, that would be trouble. It's not asking the woman to do something that would be illegal for her to do, it's asking her to do something that you don't have the slightest right to ask her, which probably constitutes sexual harassment at least. I can't really get how you would think that making prostitution legal and protecting women from harassment would be incompatible. The legality actually takes a huge amount of harassment away.
Earlier this year, the Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet wrote a blog post about exactly this topic. As it is written in Dutch, I will summarize it here: As you also said, deleting posts breaks the flow of the archived conversation and it makes your archive incomplete. This is a problem for the freedom of expression and information. But Art. 17(3) GDPR includes an exception to the right of erasure for this situation. So posts do not need to be deleted. However, profiles are not included in this exception. So they must be removed, but they can be pseudonymized. For example replace the username with user89432, and remove all details from the profile. If other posts contain the nick of the author of an anonymized post, that is considered an journalistic, academic artistic or literary expression, so Art. 85 GDPR would apply, so the right of erasure does not apply to that. Bottom line: you only have to pseudonymize the account, if that person wants to be removed from the forum.
In April 2017, a US District court on Colorado ruled that a law prohibiting women from exposing their breasts in public was an unconstitutional discrimination against women. The law was ordinance 134 passed by Fort Collins, Colorado in May 2016. The group opposing it was led by the activist organization "Free the Nipple." This ruling is not binding in other states, however. See this Snopes report for more details. The case is being appealed to the Tenth Circuit. A similar ordinance has been taken to state court in New Hampshire on similar grounds as described in this AP story and this US News story A similar claim in Illinois in 2017 resulted in a law against 'public indecency" being upheld (in Tagami v. City of Chicago) at the Federal Appeals Court level, according to this Reason story A similar law in Ocean City, Maryland, was challenged in federal court in the summer oif 2018 according to this news story. in 1991 in United States v. Biocic the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld a similar law against a similar challenge. This Munknee article lists states where a woman going topless is legal and illegal. According to a Time Article (which gives a similar list): The vast majority of states actually have laws on the books making clear that women can’t be arrested under state law solely for being topless in settings where it’s OK for men. But many local ordinances ban the practice anyway. In short, it is not yet fully settled if there is a US constitutional right for a woman to go topless, and state and local laws vary widely. Local laws do not always conform to the laws of the state, but would probably require a court challenge to enforce the state law. Laws in other countries will vary, but many places ban such exposure.