For an overview of some of the legal issues of time see "GPS and the Legal
Traceability of Time" by Judah Levine in my GPS World Innovation column,
January 2001.
-- Richard Langley
Professor of Geodesy and Precision Navigation
and Contributing Editor, GPS World Magazine
On Mon, 11 Dec 2006, Steve Allen wrote:
>Longtime readers of LEAPSECS will remember that in the wake of the
>Torino colloquium we started joking about legal implications of civil
>time in the absence of leap seconds. This was before the Internet
>Mail Archive started recording the content of the list, and due to
>issues at USNO it was among the correspondence lost to the official
>archive as well. I have had it online at
>http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/reductio.html
>
>I ran across a rather lengthy article by Jenni Parrish of UC Hastings
>College of Law in the Akron Law Review.
>http://www.uakron.edu/law/docs/parrish36.1.pdf
>It is 47 pages of legal history regarding litigation in the US (and
>also a seminal case in the UK) during the advent of standard time.
>It is copiously footnoted with source references.
>
>I have not counted whether the majority of cases were about
>the time of liquor sales (an issue which had been resonating
>throughout the US for all of the same interval of time) or
>about contractual obligations of insurers.
>The bottom line is that the discussion in LEAPSECS was no joke, for
>people really did engage in court cases about the time on the clock.
>
>This history is apparently not lost to folks at NIST, for the US
>senate continues to consider legislation which would explicitly
>rewrite US legal time to be based on UTC (as locally interpreted)
>rather than Greenwich mean solar time. The most recent incarnation of
>the bill appeared in September as S3936, and section 1406 contains the
>text to make the change. See at
>http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:S.3936.PCS:
>(and note the trailing colon in the URL).
>
>The bill has a lot of cosponsors as seen in the links on Thomas.
>Clearly the passage of this bill would short circuit a litigation
>process which the Jenni Parrish document shows to have lasted for most
>of a lifetime.
>
>To end with some fun, here's a Flash clock application
>http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
>
>--
>Steve Allen <sla_at_ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS)
>UCO/Lick Observatory Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99858
>University of California Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06014
>Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
>
===============================================================================
Richard B. Langley E-mail: lang_at_unb.ca
Geodetic Research Laboratory Web:
http://www.unb.ca/GGE/
Dept. of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering Phone: +1 506 453-5142
University of New Brunswick Fax: +1 506 453-4943
Fredericton, N.B., Canada E3B 5A3
Fredericton? Where's that? See:
http://www.city.fredericton.nb.ca/
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Received on Tue Dec 12 2006 - 05:20:09 PST