Asked about potential challenges to the city's action to limit its liability, Mr. Cardozo said, "All the facts are not in, but we believe we are invoking the statute properly".
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).
But before a judge could weigh whether Mr. Trump invoked the statute legitimately, he or she would have to decide whether the dispute is properly before the court in the first place.
Although Martin's killer George Zimmerman, who was ultimately acquitted of charges in the death, did not specifically invoke the statute in his defense, the concept was included as part of the jury's instructions on self-defense.
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.
Mr. Barr's decision to invoke the statute to start a criminal investigation of his colleagues was surely a painful one for an Attorney General whose one-year stewardship has been largely defined by his bitter opposition to demands by Democratic lawmakers for independent prosecutors.
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.
2d 1098, 1145 (C.D. Cal. 2008), the heirs of one of the co-creators of the comic-book series Superman successfully invoked the statute to reclaim their half-interest in the copyright to the Superman character.
