The Justice Department became a cheerleader for skirting decades-old international laws and treaties forbidding the brutal treatment of prisoners taken during wartime.

He stunned Malaysians last week by announcing the biggest overhaul of national security regulations in more than a generation, including plans to scrap a decades-old law allowing detention without trial.

The migration began as a trickle after 1987, when Taiwan's Nationalists lifted their harsh, decades-old martial law.

Some hotel executives blame the government for sticking to decades-old laws that limit the amount of land for sale and drive up prices.

The court found the article in the decades-old law "unconstitutional" because it goes against the principal of equal rights for men and women.

But effective in January, the state Board of Regents decided that it would begin enforcing a decades-old law that barred public libraries from charging fees to give library cards to individuals and families.

Mr. Vallone, author of a decades-old law aimed at cracking down on overcrowded buildings, harshly criticized the department for finding "no further action" necessary after visiting the 93d Street apartment in February.

Yet a struggle is looming over a proposal Mr. Wilson made this week to repeal a decades-old law requiring that counties act as a last-resort provider of help to the poor.

Under decades-old laws in New York, parental rights may be terminated if a child has been abandoned, severely neglected or abused.

Environmentalists argued that federal regulators had only recently begun enforcing a decades-old law designed to limit harmful air pollutants from old power plants and that any relaxation would cause thousands of premature deaths.