Prefatory clause [pref-uh-tor-ee klaws], noun: An obscure grammatical function whose presence, according to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, validates the current interpretation of the Second Amendment, kind of sort of.
The court found that although the Internet is still bound by rules about libel, what was posted were not assertions of "actual fact" and not actionable under defamation law, therefore protected under the First Amendment, in sort of the same way parody is.
Sometimes -- yes, sometimes -- when they cajole you for a story and preach to you about their absolute duty to the First Amendment, you sort of wonder whether all that concerns them is their self-interested duty to their own byline.
Though some senators cast the amendment as a sort of belt-and-suspenders measure that duplicated other language already in the bill, the Boxer amendment specifically said that a failing firm's assets must be sold to pay for the cost of its liquidation, with taxpayers sharing no part of the loss.
Floyd Abrams, the prominent First Amendment lawyer, said: "The district attorney is right that the speech is fully protected under the First Amendment as a sort of political advocacy.
By comparison, the constitutional issues that arise outside of constitutional law discussed in Beyond the First Amendment require the sort of special training in political theory and public policy that marks education in the social sciences".
He does not see the increase in amendments as "some sort of huge signal of a default spike coming up, but the market is more fragile than it used to be".
"Google is the world's gatekeeper for information so if Google wants to define the First Amendment to exclude this sort of material then there's not a lot the rest of the world can do about it," said Peter Spiro, a constitutional and international law professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa)., the chairman of the moderate Tuesday Group, said that even with that sort of amendment, he still would have a number of concerns.
