"While canoeing on the Rifle River in Michigan, Boomer fell overboard letting forth a fuck or two. As if his day wasn't bad enough, the nearby sheriff gave him a ticket ... for violating an 1897 statute forbidding cursing within earshot of women and children. Then he was convicted.

"Amazed that this could happen in the twenty-first century, my curiosity about the legal implications of fuck was rekindled. I decided to dedicate one of my research assistants to exploring the area."

"It is hard to imagine a better resurrection for a country that has been devastated by financial corruption than to turn facilitating transparency and justice into a business model."

"The most common response I am seeing to the Maine referendum is, "How dare they think they can vote on my civil right to marry whom I please?!" Here's the thing: you don't have a civil right to gay marriage. We want to think of civil rights as forces of nature, but they are compacts within society. And gay marriage has not been defined as a civil right by the U.S. government..."

"When Helmsley died in 2007 it was widely reported that she wanted her $8bn fortune spent only on canines. She was dubbed the "Queen of Mean" during a trial in 1989 for tax evasion. Manhattan probate court judge Troy Webber ruled that Helmsley's legal documents allowed the trustees to 'apply trust funds for such charitable purposes and in such amounts as they may, in their sole discretion, determine'"

"...But the decay and death of old laws can be just as important, even when they're unobserved. The story of our obscenity laws highlights where, exactly, American laws go to die."

"In a ruling released earlier today, a federal judge held that two sections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amended under the Patriot Act are unconstitutional."