They don't involve the U.N., they don't invoke diplomacy, they don't assert a principle of pacifism but affirm a policy of prudent and patient but ready and robust defense.
I do think, however, that your leader missed a salutary opportunity for at least the democratic West to assert a principle most oft observed in the breach: that of national self-determination ("Russia resurgent", August 16th).Russia has invoked Kosovo as a precedent for its extrajudicial intervention in Georgian affairs.
Sit-ins at lunch counters asserted a principle of equality against business owners' traditional legal right to decide whom to admit to their places.
In a defiant performance in the Commons, Cable insisted the pre-election pledge to scrap tuition fees was "no longer feasible" and went on assert a broader principle that all commitments made by either of the two coalition parties were no longer valid.
In Spain, Atlético Madrid continue to assert a similar principle, the idea that the wealthiest mega-clubs can outgrow their own strengths, overlooking the human-scale virtues of team-building and spirit in favour of an assemblage of stars, the idiot-culture of celebrity worship infecting sport as it has music, publishing and politics.
But most of all, he would change the law to assert a general avoidance principle, to stop rules being wriggled around, but let HMRC strike down any activity whose purpose is plainly to avoid tax.
But the Democratic plaintiffs in Seminole and Martin are asserting a different principle based on a mistaken interpretation of election law.
"I like coalition on principle", asserts a sprightly 91-year-old.This cheerfulness is odd, because coalition has not been kind to the Liberal Democrat Party.
It would apply this requirement to votes on changes in the Senate rules as well, and it would declare that "the rules of the Senate shall continue from one Congress to the next Congress unless they are changed as provided in these rules" — which seems a way of asserting and nullifying a principle in a very few words.
Whatever the historical details and its anachronistic clauses, for example about the interest on debts to Jews, Magna Carta sought to assert that principle, and has stood as a symbol of freedom under the law for eight centuries.
Thus was born the Ninth Amendment, whose purpose was to assert the principle that the enumerated rights are not exhaustive and final and that the listing of certain rights does not deny or disparage the existence of other rights.
