Musings!

Blog post from SCOTUSblog. Written by Lyle Denniston . Preclearance requirement sought for Texas on voting The Obama administration, seeking to salvage significant power to stop racial discrimination in voting even after a major defeat in the Supreme Court, will be asking federal courts to put the state of Texas under a continuing duty to get official permission in Washington for any changes it wants to make in its election laws or methods. Attorney General Eric Holder disclosed that plan Thursday in a speech to the annual meeting of the Urban League, in Philadelphia. Holder said the Justice Department will ask a federal district court in Texas to apply the “preclearance” requirement under the 1965 Voting Rights Act to Texas. That could only be done now, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling last month in Shelby County v. Holder, by having a court apply the so-called “bail-in” provision of the 1965 law’s Section 3. That provision was left intact by the Supreme Court. ...

This article comes from Concurring Opinions  (a group blog on legal topics), posted by Kerry Abrams. Very interesting article/post concerning DOMA's invalidation of Section 3, and what it means for binational same-sex couples when it comes to their marriage and immigration. Marriage Equality, Immigration, and … Fraud? posted by Kerry Abrams The demise of DOMA may mean that same-sex married couples are now entitled to the same marriage-based immigration benefits as anyone else. But marriage equality also entails equal burdens. As I argued in Immigration Law and the Regulation of Marriage, 91 Minn. L. Rev. 1625 (2007), immigration law holds marriages involving immigrants to a higher standard than the law ordinarily demands, and this will now be true for same-sex couples. Under state family law, married people are not required to live together. They don’t have to open joint bank accounts, jointly own property, take extensive vacation photos, document which guests attended ...

From Plato,  Symposium  (180e-192e): (translation may vary from the video)   The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word "Androgynous" is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast.  Now the sexes were three, and such as I have descr...