Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Legal debates...

First: "What's harder, for a man to do 30 pushups or a woman to do 14?"  That's from Althouse discussing the 4th Circuit case of Bauer v. Lynch, which addresses the requirements for the FBI:
"Whether physical fitness standards discriminate based on sex, therefore, depends on whether they require men and women to demonstrate different levels of fitness.... [T]he numbers of push-ups men and women must complete are not the same, but... the fundamental issue [is] whether those normalized requirements treat men in a different manner than women.... [A]n employer does not contravene Title VII when it utilizes physical fitness standards that distinguish between the sexes on the basis of their physiological differences but impose an equal burden of compliance on both men and women, requiring the same level of physical fitness of each."

Second, is Cruz eligible to be President?  From Harvard Law Today:
“Cruz claims that the narrow, historical meaning of the Constitution is literal, except when it comes to the ‘natural born citizen’ clause,” said Tribe, who taught Cruz when he was a student at HLS in 1994.
The crux of the matter is that the Constitution, in Article II, Section 2, Clause 5, states that “no person except a natural born citizen” can be president.
Under English common law, upon which U.S. law was based, a “natural born citizen” would be someone born on American soil. For Tribe, according to this definition, Cruz does not qualify. He compared Cruz to Alexander Hamilton, a founding father who was born in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, but qualified as a U.S. citizen at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and former presidential candidate John McCain, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone when it was under U.S. control.
“Unlike Cruz, McCain was born in U.S. territory,” said Tribe. “And unlike Cruz, McCain was born to two U.S. citizens, parents who had been deployed to the Panama Canal Zone by the military to serve the country.”
But for Jack Balkin ’81, a constitutional law professor at Yale University, Cruz is a “natural born citizen” because under U.S. immigration law in 1970, he automatically became an American because his mother was one. The law grants birthright citizenship to a child born overseas if one parent is a U.S. citizen.
I think question 1 might get more commenters' blood boiling...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude, if you can't do 30 push ups just go away. Salvage what little self respect you still retain.

Not JAFI much longer said...

Are the requirements in place to ensure the candidate is in the XX-percentile of physical fitness, or are the requirements in place to ensure the candidate can perform a specific task when needed?

If they are just looking for physically fit candidates because they want people that look good in a suit and dark glasses, that's one thing. If a requirement of the job is carrying 180lb person over your shoulder for 100yds, that's another.