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US Constitution Article 1, Section 9, Paragraph 3 "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." Will a legal scholar or similarly minded person
by TheAmazingIdiot 15y ago
US Constitution
Article 1, Section 9, Paragraph 3
"No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."
Will a legal scholar or similarly minded person please explain why this isn't an ex post facto (after the fact) law?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- adestefan 15y agoYou're looking for Calder v Bull where the Supreme Court decided that ex post facto only applies to criminal law and not civil law. It makes a distinction between a law that changes punishment and law for criminal proceedings or a law that is merely retroactive.
- TheAmazingIdiot 15y agoIf I'm reading correctly from Wikipedia, that decision was somewhat ambiguous. It either indicated that the State legislature had the right to order a re-review of a will, overturning a previous judgement. SCOTUS seemed to me more concerned about rights of a state legislature. Also, the Constitution does make the distinction between civil and criminal. It says "Make no law", which is in the similar wording that the Bill of Rights, Amendment 1 states.
- a-priori 15y agoI'm no legal scholar, but I think I see the distinction. By ex post facto, the US Constitution refers to a law that allows prosecution of offenses that occurred before the law was passed. That allows for all sorts of horrible abuses of power. I think it's safe to assume that there's a grandfather clause in the US law to comply with the Berne Convention, in order to allow uses of works under copyright that were in public domain at the time. If that's the case, then it wouldn't be considered ex post facto according to the US Constitution. Going forward, however, the work is copyrighted and can't be used without the permission of the author.