The presence of a belly dancer in any establishment at any time automatically invalidated the kosher certificate, they declared.

By upholding Mr. Edwards's conviction, lawyers said, the court sent the message that the constitutional problems with New York's law do not automatically invalidate all guilty pleas in capital cases.

But because these cards had not been encoded by the Transit Authority, the main system automatically invalidated them after one swipe through a turnstile.

The decision today means that this kind of Sixth Amendment violation at a sentencing hearing does not automatically invalidate a death sentence.

Two years ago, for example, the Court characterized coerced or involuntary confessions as harmless errors after such confessions had previously been treated as automatically invalidating a conviction.

A sharply divided Supreme Court ruled today that the use of a coerced confession in a criminal trial does not automatically invalidate a conviction.

The 1967 precedent, Chapman v. California, had identified all three errors - coerced confessions, absence of counsel and a biased judge - as automatically invalidating a conviction and as never being subject to harmless-error analysis.

While open-sourcing the code does in effect neutralize its copyright protection, it doesn't automatically invalidate any patents that are embodied in the code.

The Court ruled that the use of a coerced confession in a criminal trial does not automatically invalidate a conviction, but may be treated as "harmless error" if other evidence introduced at the trial was adequate to sustain a verdict of guilty.

Indeed, the Federal Highway Administration immediately withheld highway funding, which automatically invalidated the statute by its own terms.