For its first few decades, prosecutors rarely invoked the statute.
Mr. Kaminsky said that courts have applied this law to co-op apartments because proprietary leases create the requisite landlord-tenant relationship to invoke the statute.
(Thus, an agreement not to invoke the statute of limitations is binding, but an agreement not to plead that a certain contract constitutes an illegal restraint of trade is not).
The consensus seemed to be that it was OK to invoke the statute a little abstractly, if doing so helped to illuminate broader questions of authenticity, authorship and influence.
They have tried aggressively to limit exposure to claims by setting up parishes as individual corporations, invoked the statute of limitations, subjected plaintiffs to days of grueling depositions and settled claims in secret.
In its brief, the company says it has rights to the documents because according to the law, "any interested person," not just a litigant, may invoke the statute.
Lawyers for the shop invoked the protection statute, which was passed in 2005 and received forcible support from the NRA.
But if that did not happen, Republican lawmakers said today that they could invoke the federal statute.
The lawsuit began after same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in May 2004 and Gov. Mitt Romney, an opponent of it, invoked the 1913 statute, which had been originally adopted in part to block interracial marriages.
After all, it was only last month that James Murdoch chose to invoke the 1710 Statute of Anne – the first piece of copyright legislation in the world – as he criticised the British Library for trying to digitise the newspapers held in its vast collection in Colindale, north London.
