Brandeis would have scoffed at Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. as an umpire in robes calling legal balls and strikes, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor as a law robot mechanically applying statutes and precedents to facts.
Nevertheless, the subjective test is only applicable in the context of the ISA, and the rule that an objective test applies to subjectively worded powers continues to apply where statutes other than the ISA are concerned.
Although Justice Sotomayor joined his dissent as to the meaning of the statute, she did not join the portion of his opinion arguing that to apply the statute more broadly would offend the Second Amendment.
By enacting the Human Rights Act 1998, parliament required the courts, where possible, to interpret and apply both statute law and common law compatibly with the fundamental rights and freedoms protected by the European Convention.
In his testimony, Mr. Blakey, citing the history of the law's passage at a time when the United States was concerned about organized crime, said that the Russian civil court could apply the statute.
Though a federal statute criminalized importing persons into the country for "labor or service of any kind," the Court found it absurd to apply the statute to pastors brought in to serve a church.
Every state has a consumer fraud law on the books but the scope of those statutes differs from state and state, as do court decisions interpreting and applying the statutes.
"I think I counted about 20 times when they said, 'We're just applying state statutes,' " said Jonathan R. Siegel, a professor at George Washington University Law School.
The technical term frequently used by courts applying U.S. statutes to actions that occurred outside the U.S. is "extraterritoriality".
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