This kind of mitigation under environmental law is common in cases involving statutes protecting clean water and endangered species.
He says the country's "plentiful criminal and civil laws" already regulate the press and the new legal system involving statutes and a royal charter threaten the freedom of British newspapers and could constitute a breach of Article 10 of the European convention on human rights.
Beginning with the Lopez decision, which invalidated a law few people had ever heard of, most of the court's federalism rulings have involved obscure statutes or obscure constitutional provisions like the 10th and 11th Amendments.
The Texas abortion ruling that has attracted the most attention involved a statute that allowed a teenage girl to get an abortion, without notifying her parents, if she could show a court she was mature enough to understand the consequences.
Experts say tension in the deliberation room is particularly high in cases involving controversial statutes, like death penalty laws, California's "three strikes" laws for repeat offenders and New York's Rockefeller-era drug laws, which mandate long prison terms.
But CTS and its supporters argue that the CERCLA amendment is not applicable to the current case because its text refers only to "statutes of limitation," and the North Carolina law in question involves a "statute of repose".
What are the texts of the statutes involved?
"Now, over Justice Rehnquist's time on the Court, the method of analysis and argument shifted to the more solid grounds of legal arguments — what are the texts of the statutes involved, what precedents control.
"This is going to give him a strong argument that anything other than a bribery or kickbacks theory in which the government was allowed to proceed without proving the specific elements of those offenses violates the Supreme Court's decision," said Timothy P. O'Toole, a defense lawyer who has handled cases involving the statute.
A better example, he notes, involves a statute that would award attorney's fees to the winning party, and the need to think about what the original writer of the statute would mean by "attorney's fees".
