Ahh, don't you love the supposedly banned political discussion going on here? "homos", "bee taggers", SCOTUS rulings...all stuff that is germane to a road forum I guess...LOL!
Rick
It's not quite that simple. Obviously, Supreme Court rulings can very well be quite germane to a road forum. In some cases it might be direct–for example,
Bibb v. Navajo Freight Lines, Inc., 359 U.S. 520 (1959), involved the application of the Dormant Commerce Clause to strike down an Illinois law mandating a particular type of truck mud flap that was not required by any other state and that was specifically banned in at least one other state. In other cases it can be indirect. My point in quoting the 1939 case was simply to note that there is a line of case law holding that a state is not necessarily required to give effect to acts of other states if they violate a strong public policy or the like. This is no doubt one way State A can make it illegal for someone with a valid driver's license from State B to drive in State A if the person is below the legal age in State B or some such. My mention of the DOMA case was because DOMA was premised on precisely that idea–it said that no state had to recognize homosexual marriage performed in other states if doing so violated statutes or public policy (and regardless of your opinion on the issue, let's face it–just about every state either defined or defines marriage as between a man and a woman). The Supreme Court struck it down, and now other courts are extending that to say that the other states that do not recognize homosexual marriage must do so.
Obviously a driver's license is a different issue from marriage, but the point is simply the constitutional issue underpinning the analysis, which is an issue that will no doubt continue to evolve. It's not unusual for a legal principle to find application to very disparate fact patterns. Frankly, if you do legal research in some southern states, you'll find various property law cases from the 1800s that are still good law even though they relate to ownership of slaves and slavery is clearly banned now. You have to separate the repugnant factual scenario of a human being owned as a chattel from the legal analysis regarding ownership of property. It isn't always easy to do!
The moderators haven't reprimanded me for my original comment, which leads me to conclude they don't have a problem with it. If I'm mistaken, they can delete or edit my posts. As far as certain replies go....well, that's up to the moderators too. Just because certain posters are unable to restrain themselves from being childish is not a reason to assume the original comment was out of line. Now, if I had referred to the homosexual-marriage issue as "sodomy-based marriages" (as I heard a commentator do), that would be a very different situation because it would be a comment clearly made to provoke. But "homosexual marriage" is a neutral and accurate expression.
Anyway, returning to driver's licenses....I'd be interested in knowing how many people over the years have been ticketed or arrested for driving "underage" while possessing a valid license. I don't know how one would find that information, though. To be clear, what I'm envisioning is that someone who is, say, 15 years old with a valid license from State A drives into another state where the minimum age to drive is 16 (say, New York, using the example I cited earlier), gets pulled over for speeding, and then gets arrested for illegally operating a motor vehicle while underage. I'd be further interested in knowing how the courts have ruled on such things. Nowadays it wouldn't be hard to envision someone with too much time on his hands trying to fight a case like that through the appellate process (that guy in California who keeps trying to fight the Pledge of Allegiance comes to mind as the type of guy who might do this), but of course the practical difficulty here is that the typical person who would be affected by this sort of thing–a teenage kid–won't have the money for an attorney and most adults won't feel strongly enough about the issue for it to matter.