If legal code numbers ever get revised Wondering if code numbers such as 31 U.S. Code § 5330 ever get revised. So one day it is like this: Title 31 › Subtitle IV › Chapter 53 › Subchapter II › § 5330 › (a) › 1 And the next day it becomes: Title 35 › Subtitle I › Chapter 10 › Subchapter II › § 5330 › (a) › 3 That is, they either shift it around like that, or they adjust the local position like this: Title 31 › Subtitle IV › Chapter 53 › Subchapter II › § 5330 › (b) › 3 Or if it can never change because there is no concept of "versions" of the code (I'm not sure).
The US Code can be reorganized. This page gives details of the structure of the US Code. As an example or renumbering, current 42 USC 5186 was first created as section 416 of Public Law 93-288, and 42 USC 5183 was enacted as section 413. Public Law 100-707 enacted various renumberings, so section 416 of the act was redesignated section 419, and section 413 was redesignated section 416. It is useful to know of the distinction between positive law titles and non-positive law titles. Some titles in the US Code are themselves federal statutes (positive law titles), and some are editorial compilations (non-positive law title). Title 10 (Armed Forces) was directly created by act of Congress, and Title 42 (The Public Health and Welfare) results from many specific acts. Non-positive law titles are prima facie evidence of the law, and positive law titles are legal evidence of the law – the difference rests in how authoritative one is vs. the other. Generally, it doesn't matter, unless there is an error in compiling a statute into the code (which has happened: US Nat. Bank of Ore. v. Independent Ins. Agents of America, 508 U.S. 439).
Yes, if the book was published in 1913, the copyright has expired. You can freely scan it in and publish it. But note you have NO copyright to the material. You didn't write it. Copyright law gives rights to the AUTHOR of a work. It doesn't matter how much effort you went to scanning it in and formatting it. Nothing in copyright law says that that gives you any rights. If you add anything creative of your own, you would own the copyright to the new material. Like if you drew new illustrations and added them to the book. Or if you included your own commentary. Or you added explanatory footnotes. That still wouldn't give you rights to the original text, but you would own the new material. But in the same vein, if the book was originally published in 1913, but the copy you have includes material added by a later editor, that later material might still be protected by copyright. Just a side thought, it occurs to me that if I was going to republish a public domain book, a good idea would be to add footnotes. If my footnotes appear on almost every page, then no one else could just take my electronic files and sell them himself. He'd have to go through page by page and purge out all the footnotes. Make it hard for someone to "borrow" your work and you might scare them off.
There is no such law mandating this layout, nor is there any law permitting the defendant to demand a change to it. The arrangement seems most likely to have been driven by security concerns when courts began removing "the dock" and letting the defendant past the bar to sit with his attorneys. One court has also concluded that it was meant to assist the government "because it bears the burden of proof." It's of course impossible to prove a negative like this, but I'll note that Kenneth Lay's attorneys raised the issue in the Enron case, and they were unable to cite a single case saying that the defendant has the option to sit closer to the jury. If they couldn't find it, it probably doesn't exist. Meanwhile, the government was able to find several cases saying that the defendant does not have the right to demand a change, though it did not have any cases saying that the layout is mandatory. Instead, it described itself as "traditionally" having a right to the table. In that case, the judge ended up splitting the baby. Saying that there was "no law" to inform his decision, he sat the government next to the jury during its case, and it sat the defense next to the jury during its case. That was quite a bit more generous than the Seventh Circuit, which has rejected the jury-proximity argument as frivolous. So there are some cases addressing the issue, but I don't know of any case where a court has actually looked at the issue and given any real consideration to the due-process implications of the substantial empirical evidence suggesting that the party closest to the jury enjoys an advantage.
As a linguist who reads laws for a hobby, I would say that "and" legally means what it was intended to mean. There are often interpretive statutes which say that "and" can be read as "or" or vice versa, when necessary (as in ORC 1.02 "And" may be read "or," and "or" may be read "and" if the sense requires it. Delaware doesn't have that as a rule, but it is a rule employed by courts "as required". One approach to interpretation is to discern intent from surrounding text, so we would look at the whole code. The general context is the rule that "A building or land shall be used only for the following purposes". Following Article XXVII of the code, other uses could be permitted because "§115-32. Special use exceptions may be permitted by the Board of Adjustment and in accordance with the provisions of Article XXVII of this chapter and may include...". That section ends with "C:Other special use exceptions as follows", and includes "Private garages for more than four automobiles and with floor area of more than 900 square feet in a residential district". From the list of things enumerated in §115-32, there is no coherent pattern – some things are in the list of special exceptions, some things are in this list, some not. So the "surrounding text" approach doesn't help in this case. Scrutiny of legislative debate is sometimes invoked, especially at the federal level, but there is negligible chance that there is any such evidence here. The almost-final approach is to spell out the competing interpretations, and see if anything jumps out as ridiculous (because it is assumed that lawmakers do not pass ridiculous laws). The two interpretations are "both must be true", versus "one must be true". Since the general rule is that you can go ahead unless it is restricted, then with the "both" interpretation, you need a special exception permit if you simultaneously plan to have more than 4 automobiles (which means, 5+, so 4 is allowed) and floor area greater than 900 sf. Thus if you plan for only 4 cars, or can fit the 5 cars into 900 sf, then you would not require a permit (on the "both" interpretation). Which btw is the literal interpretation of "and". This is not an absurd scenario (using a generous 10'x18' space, which I derived from parking slot regulations in Danbury CT). So it is reasonable to think they meant "both". The "either of these" interpretation says that they are being even more restrictive – you need permission to have a 5+ car garage (regardless of size), and you need permission to have a garage larger than 800 sf (even if there were only 1 car in it). This seems a bit specific since there isn't generally a size restriction on structures in the code – except that playhouses are limited to 150 sf. and can't be tall enough for an adult to stand up. Since the literal meaning of "and" is "both at once", and since no facts about the code say otherwise (i.e. that interpretation does not result in an absurd nullification of some other provision), an objective court should interpret this rule to mean "both at once", thus the government imposes the fewest restrictions on your property. No way to know what they will do.
&quot;Codes&quot; are usually collections of previously existing laws. The Code of Hammurabi and the Code of Justinian were both collections of laws, gathered for easy reference. In the US, the US Code (USC) is an almost comprehensive collection of current law, much of which was passed in separate statutes before it was codified. In this contest, to codify is to include a law in the code, altering formatting and numbering to make it consistent with the rest of the code. Laws in the US are normally passed and go into effect before they are codified. In modern usage &quot;code&quot; is not normally used for a single law. There is also the US Code of Federal Regulations or CFR which is a collection of regulations passed by various federal agencies to implement law. They are not laws, but in many respects thy have the force of law. I believe that several other legal systems use &quot;code&quot; or a word that might be translated as &quot;code&quot; in a similar way. In a wider sense, &quot;code&quot; can be used to refer to an entire system of law, as &quot;the Mosaic code&quot; or &quot;the Anglo-American code&quot;. It can also be used for the precepts of a non-legsal system as &quot;an ethical code&quot; or &quot;the architect's code of practice&quot;. A bill is a proposed law not yet passed by a legislature. In modern US usage, codes only include statutes passed by legislatures, not constitutions. This is because codes collect the work of legislatures, but written constitutions come from different and special sources. The term &quot;act&quot;, in modern usage, is a synonym for &quot;statute&quot;. In historic usage not all acts were statutes, only those important enough to be routinely quoted verbatim, not paraphrased.
Yes. It is legal to update the copyright automatically. It is also legal to put the wrong year, whether it is 100 years ago, or 100 years in the future. (See 17 USC 406, which explains that an error in the date is only relevant for works published prior to March 1, 1989.) Today, you can put whatever you'd like there, as the copyright notice on a website has very little legal meaning. There are 2 main reasons for this: All content is automatically copyright protected whether you specify the copyright or not. (United States Copyright Office: Copyright Notices: "U.S. law no longer requires the use of a copyright notice") It's common knowledge that it is extremely easy to update a website and its content, so if you ever get into a legal battle where you need to prove which party created something first, the copyright date written on a website will not be considered valid evidence. Other mechanisms will need to be used, such as registered copyright or perhaps even code vaults with a trusted 3rd party. However, by displaying a proper copyright notice, "the court will not give any weight to a defendant’s use of an innocent infringement defense". (Copyright notices) That being said, what should you do? The most popular options are: Don't display a copyright notice at all. Display copyright without a year. Display the current year. Display a range from the first publish year to the current year. Display the year of last content publish. Note that the last option (display the year of the last content publish) is what some copyright experts still recommend today. But IMHO that is an outdated practice and is pointless. If your site has 1000 webpages on it, and you add one more page this year and update the site-wide copyright year along with it, that obviously does not reset the true copyright year of the other 1000 pages. Also, some people believe that a website with a copyright year older than the current year makes the site appear stale, which may hurt the site's reputation. If you feel that your website could fall into that category, then an auto-update or no year at all is probably the best way to go.
It isn't uncommon to interlineate contract language, or to cross out contract language, with the initials of the parties to the contract. This is normally only done with smaller businesses, however, where there is someone who has the authority to do so. Some contracts, such as insurance contracts, for example, have to have their language approved by state regulators before they can be used and can't be modified in that fashion.
The core principle of stare decisis is that the law should not depend on what judge you got; two cases with the same facts should have the same outcome. In the common-law tradition, there weren't really written statutes; there was only "what's been done in the past," and so the only reference you'd have to what the law should be in some situation is past court decisions. If judges didn't have some constraints to rule similarly to before, there really wouldn't be any legal standards (because there was no written law to go back to; in civil-law countries, there always has been a written law, so precedent isn't so important). Stare decisis doesn't actually directly stop a judge from entering a decision that goes against binding precedent. However, judges are expected to obey precedent, and for the most part do what they're supposed to do. If they don't, the case will likely be reversed on appeal. Binding precedent only applies within the area a court serves; a court doesn't have to listen to precedent from a different court that has nothing to do with the case. The rule is that precedent from any court up the appeals chain is binding; federal district courts are bound by their circuit court and SCOTUS, state courts are bound by higher state courts and SCOTUS (but not other federal courts, as the case can't be appealed to them). A court can sometimes overrule its own precedent, but the cases where it can do that are rare (and so applying a higher court's precedent can also be viewed as "if you appeal to them they'll say X, so we're saying X.")