In the meantime, Romney did some executive huffing and puffing, summoning up a dusty 1914 miscegenation statute that barred out-of-state couples from marrying in Massachusetts if their union was prohibited at home.

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That law shortened the statute of limitations after which charges are time-barred, a provision that directly benefited Mr Berlusconi.

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In 2005 a Michigan court of appeals, citing the state's anticohabitation statute, barred a man's live-in girlfriend from their joint home when his kids from his first marriage visited.

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