A statute of limitations, known in civil law systems as a prescriptive period, is a law passed by a legislative body to set the maximum time after an event within which legal proceedings may be initiated. In most jurisdictions, such periods exist for both criminal law and civil law such as contract law and property law, though often under different names and with varying details.
The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) is an American not-for-profit performance-rights organization (PRO) that collectively licenses the public performance rights of its members' musical works to venues, broadcasters, and digital streaming services.
Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) is a performance rights organization in the United States. It collects blanket license fees from businesses that use music, entitling those businesses to play or sync any songs from BMI's repertoire of over 20.6 million musical works. On a quarterly basis, BMI distributes the money to songwriters, composers, and music publishers as royalties to those members whose works have been performed.
The U.S. state of Washington enforced capital punishment until the state's capital punishment statute was declared null and void and abolished in practice by a state Supreme Court ruling on October 11, 2018. The court ruled that it was unconstitutional as applied due to racial bias however it did not render the wider institution of capital punishment unconstitutional and rather required the statute to be amended to eliminate racial biases. From 1904 to 2010, 78 people were executed by the state; the last was Cal Coburn Brown on September 10, 2010. In April 2023, Governor Jay Inslee signed SB5087 which formally abolished capital punishment in Washington State and removed provisions for capital punishment from state law.
Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Despite the changing attitudes in the coming decades regarding sterilization, the Supreme Court has never expressly overturned Buck v. Bell. It is widely believed to have been weakened by Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942), which involved compulsory sterilization of male habitual criminals. Legal scholar and Holmes biographer G. Edward White, in fact, wrote, "the Supreme Court has distinguished the case [Buck v. Bell] out of existence". In addition, federal statutes, including the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, provide protections for people with disabilities, defined as both physical and mental impairments.
Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization, 307 U.S. 496 (1939), is a US labor law case decided by the United States Supreme Court.
In 1924, the Virginia General Assembly enacted the Racial Integrity Act. The act reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage and classifying as "white" a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian." The act, an outgrowth of eugenist and scientific racist propaganda, was pushed by Walter Plecker, a white supremacist and eugenist who held the post of registrar of Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics.
United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that involved a Second Amendment to the United States Constitution challenge to the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA). The case is often cited in the ongoing American gun politics debate, as both sides claim that it supports their position.
Article IV, Section 1 of the United States Constitution, the Full Faith and Credit Clause, addresses the duty that states within the United States have to respect the "public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state." According to the Supreme Court, there is a difference between the credit owed to laws as compared to the credit owed to judgments. Judges and lawyers agree on the meaning of the clause with respect to the recognition of judgments rendered by one state in the courts of another. Barring exceptional circumstances, one state must enforce a judgment by a court in another, unless that court lacked jurisdiction, even if the enforcing court otherwise disagrees with the result. At present, it is widely agreed that this Clause of the Constitution has a minimal impact on a court's choice of law decision provided that no state’s sovereignty is infringed, although this Clause of the Constitution was once interpreted to have greater impact.
Thomas F. Gallagher was a justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court from 1943 until his retirement in 1967.
In United States law, a federal enclave is a parcel of federal property within a state that is under the "Special Maritime and Territorial Jurisdiction of the United States". In 1960, the year of the latest comprehensive inquiry, 7% of federal property had enclave status. Of the land with federal enclave status, 57% was under "concurrent" state jurisdiction. The remaining 43%, on which some state laws do not apply, was scattered almost at random throughout the United States. In 1960, there were about 5,000 enclaves, with about one million people living on them. While a comprehensive inquiry has not been performed since 1960, these statistics are likely much lower today, since many federal enclaves were military bases that have been closed and transferred out of federal ownership.
Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court's decision articulated the view that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state. Jacobson has been invoked in numerous other Supreme Court cases as an example of a baseline exercise of the police power.
Gallagher v. Crown Kosher Super Market of Massachusetts, Inc., 366 U.S. 617 (1961), is a United States Supreme Court case that declared that a kosher butcher store had to abide by the state laws that banned them from selling on Sunday.
George W. Bush & Sons Co. v. Malloy, 267 U.S. 317 (1925), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court, which held that the state statute under which the Maryland Public Service Commission (PSC) issued certificates of public convenience and necessity to common carriers engaged in interstate commerce violated the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution.
Massachusetts Board of Retirement v. Murgia, 427 U.S. 307 (1976), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held a Massachusetts law setting a mandatory retirement age of 50 for police officers was Constitutionally permissible.
Estate of Thornton v. Caldor, Inc., 472 U.S. 703 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a state statute providing employees with an absolute right not to work on their chosen Sabbath violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Gibbs v. Buck, 307 U.S. 66 (1939), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court had two main holdings. First, an association of copyright holders, ASCAP, may sum their collective costs to meet the damages threshold for federal jurisdiction. Second, a motion to dismiss allegations that raise "grave doubts about the constitutionality" of legislation should be denied.
