Do sanskrit-mottos from religious texts violate secularism in India? In India many Government Institutions, agencies, Judicial Bodies etc use mottos from religious texts primarily Hindu texts like Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads etc. Does this violate concept of secularism followed in India ? Some mottos - Supreme Court - यतो धर्मस्ततो जयः (Yato Dharmas Tato Jayaḥ) [from Mahabharata ] (translation: &quot;&quot;Where there is Dharma, there will be Victory&quot; Dharma is a concept of central importance in Indian philosophy and religion that has multiple meanings in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. More idiomatically, but less exactly, &quot;the righteous will be victorious&quot;) National motto - सत्यमेव जयते (Satyameva Jayate) [from Mudaka Upanishad ] (translation: &quot;Truth alone triumphs&quot;) Research and Analysis Wing - धर्मो रक्षति रक्षितः (Dharmō rakṣati rakṣitaḥ) [from Manusmriti ] (translation: &quot;those who protect the Dharma are protected by the Dharma.&quot; More idiomatically but less exactly, &quot;those who stand up for what is right will be protected by the righteous&quot;)
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).
A school district has been sued for something like that. In Church of God, Etc. v. Amarillo Indep. Sch., 511 F. Supp. 613, plaintiffs successfully sued the school district "to enjoin the enforcement of the Amarillo School District's absence policy which limits the number of excused absences for religious holidays to two days each school year", where "A fundamental tenet of the Church of God is that members must abstain from secular activity on seven annual holy days". The school district imposed an absence polity where "School work missed may be made up whether an absence is excused or unexcused", and "Excused absences shall be granted to students for a maximum of 2 days for religious holidays in each school year". The court concluded that "This policy poses an unquestionable burden on the Plaintiffs' religious belief", and "This burden is not ameliorated by the make-up work provision. The provision does not require a teacher to evaluate the work made up. It in fact directs the teacher to enter a zero for that work". In this case "Summary judgment is granted and judgment rendered enjoining the enforcement of the Amarillo Independent School District's excused absence policy insofar as it limits the number of excused absences for religious holidays". This is not a matter of religious discrimination, this is a First Amendment issue. The policy is in violation of the Free Exercise clause. Eliminating spring break per se is not a problem: doing so and providing no excused absences is the problem. In the above case, there was clear a religious principle of the church to the effect that one must be off the clock on the holiday. As far as I know, there is no requirement to abstain from work or school on Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday or Good Friday. Nevertheless, in recognition of New Jersey state law which allows any student to take off a religious holiday – including Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, and dozens more – the Board of Education has prepared a list of such holidays, which includes Wiccan, Hindu, Baha'i, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Church of Scientology (and so on) religious holidays.
No The importance of following precedent, and the principle of stare decisis were inherited by the early US legal system from the British Common Law system, and have been taken as part of the natural order of the legal system by US courts ever since. This extends even to a court overruling itself. US Courts are notoriously reluctant to overrule their past decisions, even when current court members agree, However they will do so from time to time. The US Supreme Court in particular will flatly overturn previous decisions, especially on Constitutional issues, when it thinks there is no other way to achieve a proper outcome, although it often prefers to distinguish the prior decision without actually overruling it. I think the fastest and most extreme case where the US Supreme Court overruled itself was that of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), the second flag-salute case. (This was also a particularly significant case.) This reversed Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940) a case on the exact same issue, only three years previously, and a vote of 8-1 on the first case became a vote of 6-3 the other way, with only one new Justice on the Court. Only Justice Frankfurter, the author of the fist decision, issued a dissenting opinion in the Barnette case, and no other Justice formally joined that opinion.
In the german language, in jurisprudence, we have lots of latin terms / expressions, because latin expressions seem to be more exact. Is this also the case in the english speaking world? You are correct that there are many Latin expressions in the English speaking legal world. You are not fully correct regarding the reasons that this is the case, and in some instances this means that you can't trust a Latin legal term to mean the same thing in common law jurisprudence as it does in civil law jurisprudence. In England, Latin made its way into legal use because the clergy and literate Norman French elites spoke Latin for affairs of consequence and state and used it for that purpose in much the same manner that elites in India today use the English language. But, they were using Latin to document their own rulings and decisions in the feudal records which were largely based on tradition, common sense and local custom and practice. (This was also true in Scandinavia until the Scandinavians adopted legal codes based upon continental models in the 18th and 19th centuries or so.) In Germany (and most of continental Europe) the situation was different. In the Roman Empire, the judicial role was delegated mostly to people we would call arbitrators these days, who issued written decisions in Latin after cases were litigated before them by people we would call lawyers today, and these were collected, edited, arranged by subject and published in books that are the equivalent of the legal digests or case reporters today. When the Roman Empire collapsed, these fell into disuse, but monks continued to copy sets of them of future generations through the dark ages. Then, sometimes around the late Middle Ages/early Rennaisance it became fashionable for lords and officials making judicial determinations to reference these digests in their decision making on something of a grass roots basis until it became accepted practice after a few centuries for there to be formally trained jurists who were familiar with the digests and it was expected that these trained professionals relying on these historic Roman legal sources were the only legitimate way to make legal decisions. This process is called the "reception" of Roman law in early modern Europe and was the foundation of the law in most continental European countries that ultimately became civil law countries until it was so jumbled and arcane that Napoleon streamlined it by having an expert prepare his civil code with the idea that it could be used to get fair and accurate legal resources without lawyers or legally trained jurists. Germany and Spain then copied this efforts in their respective national styles. Germany strove to be more detailed and more exactly accurate in codifying the Roman law substrate using "legal science" intended for use by legal professionals, and has a longer more detailed civil code with more major categories and more rigorously consistent used of defined terms throughout their codes as a result. Spain was, if anything, a bit more loose in drafting than the French, but made substantive adjustments to reflect local ideas on the correct rule of law. These codes, in turn, were used as models by almost everyone else in Europe. To make a long story short then, Germany and other continental European countries use Latin legal terms not just because Latin was a common language of the clergy and literate elite, but because they were borrowing Roman legal terminology directly from Roman legal sources that had been preserved by monks in through the Middle Ages and then restored to active use in the early modern period, unlike the English, who were mostly coining Latin legal terms for non-Roman legal concepts or borrowing Roman legal terminology in an uninformed and frequently not technically accurate way compared to the way they were used by the trained legal scholars familiar with Roman legal sources on the continent.
What discrimination? As explained in Conflict between a religious belief that accounts for the existence of transgender people vs. one that doesn&#39;t the Constitutional protection of the Free Exercise Clause applies to the exercise of a deeply held belief (religious or not). So, let's accept that a person believes that certain sexual practices or gender identity is morally repugnant for whatever reason and that belief triggers the Constitutional protections. That means, that the person cannot be forced to engage in those sexual practices or adopt a different gender identity. It does not mean that they have a licence to discriminate against people who do in a work or public environment - they can, of course, choose to avoid such people in their private life. Alternatively, if the person believes that they are required by their faith to discriminate on the basis of those characteristics then such a belief does not get Constitutional protection as it is now affecting the rights of others. In the same way that someone who believed in human sacrifice would not get Constitutional protection.
Under the present constitution . . . Are there any consequences of the fact that the Constitution of Massachusetts and the Constitution of the United States use two different names for that state? No. Lots of the language in the United States Constitution is no longer in place or in common usage or is invalid due to subsequent amendments, and that language is still effective as originally intended. The U.S. Constitution has never been "amended and restated" and can't be understood properly without annotations to its raw text. Might a federal statute be needed for some states (e.g. Vermont, because of what is noted above) but not for others, because of differences in the federal statutes that admitted the state, or because of the lack of any need for admission by Congress in the case of the original thirteen states? Not really. Every state's name is embedded in myriad federal laws and regulations in addition to the statute that admitted the state to the United States, e.g. laws assigning names to post offices, laws allocating judgeships, laws purchasing property, laws appropriating funds, laws assigning states to various districts for purposes of executive branch departments and the judiciary, tax laws (e.g. the Obamacare tax credit), etc. Would a state statute suffice? Would a state constitutional amendment suffice? Would a federal statute suffice without a state statute or a state referendum? Would a federal constitutional amendment be needed? A federal constitutional amendment would not be needed. The Constitution vests Congress with the authority to admit states and to change their boundaries with the permission of the affected states. This would be within the power over states that could be inferred from those powers. A state and the federal government could each pass a statute to call itself something different for various purposes. For example, the official name of the state of Rhode Island is "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" but various state and federal statutes authorize the use of the short form of the "State of Rhode Island" for most purposes. As a practical matter a state constitutional amendment would probably be desirable on general principles to officially change the name of a state, whether or not it was strictly required, in part, because a state constitution usually sets forth an official name of a state in its body text. It would be possible for a state to change its constitution and statutes and change its name in a move that the federal government did not accept, and if that happened, the federal government and its officials would probably continue to use the old name and the state government and its officials would probably use the new name. I think it is as a practical matter, unlikely that a standoff like this would persist, but I think that this is the most likely outcome. A federal government move to change a state's name without its consent proactively, however, would probably be struck down as violating federalism concerns. Of course, all of this is speculative, because there are really no precedents for disputes over the changing of a state's name. Context would influence the outcome of any such case.
Your beliefs about your past and your mission would probably be considered to be personal religious beliefs. As Israel does not have a state religion this does not have any legal significance (except it may make a difference as to which religious court is considered to have jurisdiction over your family disputes). Your religious beliefs do not override the law, because otherwise anyone could make anything legal for themselves just by declaring a belief that it was moral. Hence you will be subject to all the same laws as everyone else. If you break the law and claim your beliefs as justification then you may be judged unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity and committed to a mental hospital.
No. I can't give a more detailed answer without reference to a specific statute. But just about every state anti-bullying statute in the U.S. restricts the definition to...well, bullying. There is a good summary of state bullying and cyberbullying statutes here. The laws are varied, but they invariable contain words like "harassment", "abuse", "threatening," "fear," and "hostile environment." Would it be possible to "cyberbully" someone on Stack Exchange under some of these statutes? Sure. You could do it in comments; in answers; even in questions. "Question: Is Bill in my algebra class a dork, or a tool?" Comment: "This is a terrible question, and I'm going to burn your house down. Downvoting." You could probably fit something like that under some of the broader statutes--although they still for the most part haven't been tested for First Amendment issues. But I don't know of any statute broad enough to include downvoting a question or answer, on a site people post on knowing that the whole purpose of posting is to allow their posts to be upvoted and downvoted. If there was such a statute--and again, I don't know of any--it would almost certainly be unconstitutional. There is no law against hurting people's feelings, at least in the United States, and a law that allows people to seek legal redress for someone saying "I disagree with you" is pretty much the poster child for a First Amendment violation.