Word: legalism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Love, he chirped in the Jackson 5 song he co-wrote, was as "easy as 1-2-3." When it came to handling the bigger sums the singer would go on to amass, though, Jackson never really got a grip on the numbers. Profligate spending, a slew of legal settlements and a reliance on ever increasing bank loans blew a hole in the fortune Jackson earned over four decades of performing. Some estimates put the singer's debt at the time of his death at $300 million. Others put him almost twice as far into the red. (See pictures...
...acre (roughly 1,000 hectares) ranch in California that would become Neverland. Maintaining the theme park - complete with zoo, movie theater and fairground - swallowed up about $5 million annually. As Jackson gradually retreated from work, the additional millions eaten up by plane charters, antiques, lavish gifts and legal disputes - a child-molestation case in the early 1990s cost Jackson around $20 million to settle - left a hole in his fortune. To help plug it, in 1995 the singer signed over to Sony a 50% stake in the rights to the Beatles' catalog in exchange for almost $100 million. (Watch TIME...
...widow penalty on its own yet. Conservative immigration think tanks like the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, for example, say the rule is a sensible safeguard against rampant marriage fraud, sham matrimonies between a U.S. citizen and a foreigner solely to get the latter a green card or legal residence...
...Brent Renison, an Oregon immigration attorney who has headed up numerous suits challenging the widow penalty, calls the marriage-fraud argument bogus. "We've never asked for automatic approval of these widows' legal residence status," he says. "We simply ask that they be allowed to show that their marriages were valid, and if so, recognize that the humane thing to do is let them stay where they've made a new life." That's especially true, Renison insists, when the surviving spouse has a U.S.-born child from the marriage. In one of the more controversial cases, a Brazilian woman...
...courts are increasingly siding with the widows as well. In April, a federal judge in Los Angeles told Homeland Security to reopen the cases of 22 immigrants denied green cards because their U.S. spouses had died, ruling that the deaths should not nullify the widows' (or widowers') legal residence applications. But there have been judicial defeats for the widows as well - some judges have ruled, understandably, that current immigration law ties their hands - which is why some people are relying on legislation like Nelson-McGovern...