First sketches of the day by artist Bill Hennessy.
Came across this article yesterday and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. The graph I selected basically says if you take a photo of someone on the street and make a profit or gain, you could be arrested. So does this mean I will have to get a license to continue the site?
Under current city regulations, persons or businesses that “engage in the business of taking photographs of any person or persons upon the streets, sidewalks, or other public spaces of the District of Columbia, for profit or gain” must hold a city license and follow a number of rules governing their conduct. Breaking them happens to be an arrestable offense.
"No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this state."
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Article 14, Section 265 of the Missississippi State Constitution
Though it is not enforced, and is against Article VI, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution, this still remains on the books.
"If Islamic law were some book where you could look to it and cite to it, and say, it says right here that western democracy is bad, then maybe that would make sense. But that’s just ridiculous… This claim of Islam’s incompatibility with democracy has nothing to do with anything historical, or anything in legal texts."
— Lena Salaymeh, a Harvard-trained lawyer now working on her doctorate in Islamic legal history at Berkeley, tells Religion Dispatches‘ Sarah Posner
Would Superman Pass the Birther Test? Blawgers discuss Clark Kent’s citizenship, Wolverine’s health insurance, and why Bruce Wayne needs a good lawyer.
If you had the ability to shoot plasma from your hands, would you need a concealed weapons permit? It’s a silly question, we know. Of course you would—and the state would be obligated to grant you one, provided you had no serious criminal history and the plasma-blasting was something you could control.
At least, that’s the legal conclusion drawn by James Daily of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and Ryan Davidson, an insurance lawyer from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Daily and Davidson are the founders of Law and the Multiverse, the first blawg to seriously consider such questions as: Would mutants be protected by the Americans for Disabilities Act? Is Batman a state actor? And what’s the best place for a super-villain to build his super-secret hideaway? (Answers: yes, yes, and outer space). Law and the Multiverse is where DC Comics meets D.C. v. Heller, and habeas corpus meets levicorpus.
Mother Jones spoke with the dynamic duo recently about the Affordable Care Act, Citizens United, and the zombie apocalypse.
My favorite part:
MJ: Prior to the Affordable Care Act, would health insurers have been permitted to discriminate against mutants? Is that the ultimate pre-existing condition?
James Daily: Most mutant conditions don’t seem to involve a lot of special health care needs.
Ryan Davidson: Quite the opposite.
JD: Wolverine for example would be a health insurer’s dream.
RD: They’d sign him up any day of the week.
JD: Now, separate from the issue of whether or not they have a mutation, is being a superhero. That does seem to be fairly dangerous and does land folks in the hospital on a fairly regular basis. They always seem to make a miraculous recovery, but still, they do need medical attention quite frequently. So listing “superhero” as your occupation might make your health insurance premiums pretty high.
RD: Life insurance premiums would also be pretty bad—particularly as some of those people might die more than once.
