Word: dicta
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...dismissing strong language in some Warren Court rulings as mere dicta (discussions not crucial to a decision), the new court has snipped away at due-process precedents. So far, the chief casualty has been the Warren Court's famous decision in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which held that police cannot question a suspect in custody until they inform him of his constitutional rights to silence and counsel. At issue this term in Harris v. New York was whether statements made by an unwarned suspect could be used to impeach his testimony at trial. By a vote...
...tape recording of a student's speech during the strike of May '68 is played, then speeded up, then slowed to catch a section of his speech so far ahead that its subject has changed. When this tape is running at high speed a whispering voice supplies theoretical dicta for revolutionary action, possibly as a critique of the first. What this mode of presentation implies is unclear. Lacking accompanying images, the two broken-up monologues have no reference and scarcely more meaning. An extended enquiry might reveal the point of this sequence- it may be just that non-referential speech...
...campaign, Walinsky is walking a political tightrope similar to that of Robert Kennedy in its simultaneous appeal to both liberals and conservative workingmen. In so doing, he is going against the popular political dicta offered by Richard Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg in their recent book The Real Majority (TIME, Aug. 31). One of their theses holds that American voters will accept only centrist candidates who are willing to acknowledge and condemn violent social unrest. Walinsky dismisses that argument. "This Scammon-Wattenberg middle is a lot of crap," he says. "You can appeal to differing sides of the spectrum...
...stout band of connoisseurs. By contrast, little attention has been paid to the fine points of enjoying America's own proud indigenous beverage-ubiquitous, multi-flavored, effervescent soda pop. To remedy that omission, California Novelist Earl Shorris (Boots of the Virgin) has set down some obiter dicta in San Francisco's Sunday Examiner & Chronicle. Tongue firmly in cheek, he sounds a clarion call to those who prefer pop to other drinks but feel that it is socially unacceptable. "Drink what you like," he advises. "Don't be discouraged from indulging your personal preferences by snobbish glances...
...Missing Dicta. Despite the imprimatur of Washington's conservative Patrick Cardinal O'Boyle, the N.A.B. enshrines many Protestant critical theories that have won wide acceptance in Catholic seminaries in the past 20 years. The Douay preface once reminded everyone that since God inspired the Bible, it could have no "formal error," and that the church must be the ultimate interpreter. These dicta are now missing. In other departures from Douay, the N.A.B. questions the Bible's strict historical accuracy, avoids old insistences that Matthew (which contains key passages bearing on Catholic dogma) was the earliest Gospel...