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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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