Mark Eckenwiler posted this to Cyberia-L, with Subject: Re: House panel votes behind closed doors to build in Big Brother chris mohr writes: + Suppose that the use of particular languages other than English or + a few other common ones, such as Spanish or French, was forbidden over the + telephone Interestingly, there is some Supreme Court case law arguably on point. In _Yu Cong Eng v. Trinidad_, 271 US 500 (1926), the Supreme Court considered the validity of a Philippine statute that prohibited the keeping of business records in lanuages other than English, Spanish, or "any local dialect." (I'll omit an explanation of why the Court was analyzing Philippine law under the U.S. Constitution.) The Court found that in charging the petitioner (who kept his books in Chinese), the Philippines had deprived him of liberty and property w/o due process and had deprived him of equal protection under the laws. (I should add that the legislation, which would also have technically applied to records in German or Urdu, was known locally as the Chinese Bookkeeping Act.) Note, however, that the Court observed in the same breath that "the Philippine government may make every reasonable requirement of its taxpayers to keep proper records of their business transactions in English or Spanish . . . ." 271 US at 525. -- "This case presents the perhaps unprecedented situation of a court, as litigant, petitioning itself, as court, for relief." In re Skupniewitz, 73 F.3d 702 (7th Cir. 1996) Mark Eckenwiler eck@panix.com