631–640 of 1001 posts
Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law. To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right. I disagree with this reasoning. As a counterexample I point you to squatters rights. If I live on your land long and openly enough, my unlawful act will confer ownership of…
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>I guess I trust the Supreme Court more than I trust Congress It's quite a damning indictment of US-style democracy that people trust a small cabal of unelected lifetime appointees without any meaningful oversight, over a larger pool of democratically elected officials.
The root of the problem (and this isn't unique to US-style democracy) is that any body that has to deal with re-election every few years is going to focus more on things that get them re-elected, not necessarily things that are good or sustainable for the state as a whole. That's just human nature, and I don't think there's a way to fix that problem without fundamentally changing how with think of elections and terms…
I found the conclusion compelling. I haven't yet had enough time this morning to read the dissent thoughtfully. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-9526_9okb.pdf "The federal government promised the Creek a reservation in perpetuity. Over time, Congress has diminished that reservation. It has sometimes restricted and other times expanded the Tribe’s authority. But Congress has never withdrawn the promised…
> Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law And yet "adverse possession" allows my neighbor to keep a slice of my yard, because he build the fence shortly before I bought the house (while it was unoccupied!) and I assumed it was proper after I moved in, and now that I've had a survey done and realized his fence is 5' off target, it's too late because he official…
English history gave us a very confusing legal structure, where there are statutes, (common) law, and equity -- all variously called "the law."
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Gorsuch is a joy to read because he mixes in history with some interesting side comments.
I spend a lot of time in the summers reading SCOTUS opinions, and I have to flatly disagree with this. Gorsuch peppers in these comments and they distinctly detract from the legal reasoning in the Opinion. It’s cute, but superfluous and further turns justices into “rockstars” to be cheered, which is bad.
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No thank you. As someone who lives in one of those states this is a worrying precedent. Maybe if their laws didn't apply to me as a non citizen I would be ok with this. As it is, I can be arrested for stopping at the wrong gas station with a firearm in my car. I have no choice but to pass through reservations on a regular basis. And I have no input in the government that makes their laws. Nor any hope of ever being h…
> And I have no input in the government that makes their laws. Nor any hope of ever being heard. Yet those laws apply to me just the same. That is also the reality of 40 million immigrants in the US.
One thing I'm unclear about is this: "If Congress wishes to withdraw its promises, it must say so." The question in the case, as I understand it, was whether previous acts of Congress had in fact dissolved the reservation. Could Congress, if they wanted to, pass a resolution saying, "Actually, such-and-such bill from 100-some years ago dissolved the reservation." Or can they only say, "Starting today, the reservation…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_State...
Congress is prohibited from passing ex post facto laws by clause 3 of Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution.
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Every country in the world that exists today is occupied by a people who can be traced back to a conquering nation. If you think through the implications of your statement, you'd see you're talking about wiping out 10,000 years of history and forcibly moving 7 billion people somewhere else.
Proximity in time and space add important context to the issue. There are still many places in the world where injustices are happening due to this kind of problem, saying that it has always been this way doesn't add anything to the conversation.
So how long do non-native Americans have to wait for it to no longer be stolen land? What's the date? Because in order to believe that your line of thinking is logical, surely you at least have a vague answer to that question.
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What you're referencing is probably a "prescriptive easement" and is legal (depending on your jurisdiction). If your jurisdiction does not have "adverse possession" or "prescriptive easement" laws, you can probably tear that fence down or do whatever else you want with it. (IANAL and please just talk to your neighbors first!) None of this is related, either legally or in spirit, with the sentence you cited. The cited…
I agree with you on the legal aspects, but the mind-bending bit is that the neighbor's actions -- at the time -- were not legal (because no, it is not legal to build structures on someone else's property without their permission), but because it was left to sit that way for some period of time, the result of those actions -- a de facto redrawing of property lines -- has become the new legal status. Which, honestly, s…
Yes, the point is there is a specific law that says this, and it's really not that unreasonable, since precise property boundaries are always ultimately conventional.
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>I guess I trust the Supreme Court more than I trust Congress It's quite a damning indictment of US-style democracy that people trust a small cabal of unelected lifetime appointees without any meaningful oversight, over a larger pool of democratically elected officials.
The root of the problem (and this isn't unique to US-style democracy) is that any body that has to deal with re-election every few years is going to focus more on things that get them re-elected, not necessarily things that are good or sustainable for the state as a whole. That's just human nature, and I don't think there's a way to fix that problem without fundamentally changing how with think of elections and terms…