Quote (PapaPsych @ Jul 23 2024 05:37pm)
Now I know you are just blowing smoke up my ass, it means what it says, there is no double negatives there.
No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the United States and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state for which he shall be chosen.
{No person shall}
* {who shall not have}
* {who shall not, ... , be}
Its not that hard to parse. It lays out disqualifying conditions for senators, stated as "No person shall be a senator". Ergo, all that follows are the disqualifying conditions
The conditions are:
>who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the United States
and
>who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state for which he shall be chosen
If either of those conditions are true, you can't be a senator. They have their own substructures, thus it follows:
(~A) if (~(B & C) || ~D)
where
A = can be a senator
B = is 30+ years old
C = has been a citizen for 9+ years
D = is an inhabitant of that state when elected
This is very purposefully written as a double negative, using a negative at each branch, instead of the inverse case which would be;
A if ((B & C) & D)
which would translate to
"A person can be a senator if he has attained to the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the United States, and who shall, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state for which he shall be chosen."
The statements are the same in discrete logic, but have a huge difference in law as millenia of creative reinterpretation of text has allowed judiciaries throughout history to bend affirmations far more than negations. The founding fathers were very wary of the kinds of shit modern day courts run amok doing all the time, and prescient to that danger they wrapped lots of important clauses in onerous double negatives to basically tell elana kagan to fuck off