Word: legally
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling banning compulsory prayer in public schools. After that, any worship on school premises, let alone a prayer club, was widely understood as forbidden. But for the past few years, thanks to a subsequent court case, such groups not only have been legal but have become legion...
...turnabout culminates a quarter-century of legislative and legal maneuvering. The 1963 Supreme Court decision and its broad-brush enforcement by school administrators infuriated conservative Christians, who gradually developed enough clout to force Congress to make a change. The resulting Equal Access Act of 1984 required any federally funded secondary school to permit religious meetings if the schools allowed other clubs not related to curriculum, such as public-service Key Clubs. The crucial rule was that the prayer clubs had to be voluntary, student-run and not convened during class time...
When he was appointed "special master" last December in the Justice Department's closely watched antitrust suit against Microsoft, Lawrence Lessig expected that by spring he'd be the most important person in the court--the expert telling Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson how to sort through the legal and technological issues underlying the complex case. Instead, he's the one being judged. A federal appeals court will decide this week whether he is, as Microsoft claims, too deeply biased against it to make an impartial recommendation...
...bizarre twist in what is already one of the most tangled tales in the history of antitrust. Lessig, 36, a Harvard professor of law, is primarily a constitutional, rather than an antitrust, expert. Nevertheless, he is widely recognized as a leading thinker on how to adapt ancient legal principles to the new digital age. When the Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act last year, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor repeatedly cited his article "Reading the Constitution in Cyberspace" in her separate opinion. He has written famously about the "tyranny of code," how seemingly insignificant details of software design...
...computer community when he argued against their push to establish a software standard for filtering pornographic images. Such software, he argued, limits the speech of its users without their even knowing it--a result nearly as pernicious as direct government censorship. It was an interesting insight, and many legal scholars were looking forward to hearing what Lessig would have to say about Bill Gates. Now it's up to the appeals court to decide whether they'll get that chance...