[muawiyah]

So, quite entertaining. BTW, when it's a form versus a rule, the form wins regarding data, but is secondary to the rule with respect to legal references. When it's a rule versus a law, the law wins every time ~ which means you get judicial decisions that seem to affect only the law but otherwise affect the rule.

How this works ~ Supreme Court made abortion legal ~ in the sense that no court decision that punished you would ever be upheld by the USSC. So USPS had a rule regarding abortificants and whether or not they could be kept out of the mail. Obviously that rule might have something to do with the USSC ruling on abortion, but it wasn't taken out. That's because it had its OWN law backing it up and the various USSC decisions had no impact on that particular law.

A million feminist harpies descended on USPS trying to get it changed. They were all turned away.

Here we have a BOH "rule" that appears on the face of things to be inconsistent with the way LFBCs are produced in Hawaii these days ~ PLUS ~ we have another rule that interposes the requirement for a "seal" in between the Constitutional clause regarding full faith and credit (with no reference to a seal) and that document.

I suspect Obama and the BOH "win" in court on that one.

Doesn't matter if I agree or disagree, just thought you'd like to know.

There was a time "seals" were useful because they were rather difficult to reproduce ~ wasn't just that they were lending some magical character to the document that made it "real" ~ the concern was more with counterfeiting.

[butterdezillion]

There is no way a cover letter would work to certify anything, unless the chain of provenance was unbroken. IOW, if the HDOH sent directly to a judge a cover letter saying that what was in the envelope was certified, then the cover letter could have meaning. That’s how it works with academic transcripts and such. But unless a person documents exactly what comes out of that envelope, a certifying cover letter would only be a signed blank check. I can’t see any court in the country accepting anything that way. That’s why certified records have to have a seal.

You are really desperately stretching if you would throw away the need for authenticating marks on documents. We may as well wear a sign on our foreheads saying, “Kick me”. Anybody could make any claim, with no way of knowing what really came from the authorities.

Of course, when the authorities break laws and rules at will and with impunity, the whole society has a sign that says, “Kick me”. And that’s exactly what’s happening.