Alabama and Georgia filed motions Thursday in the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit seeking to stay proceedings on challenges to their immigration laws pending a ruling by the US Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States . The Supreme Court agreed Monday to rule on a challenge to Arizona’s controversial immigration law [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Damian Ugwu, Executive Director of the Social Justice & Advocacy Initiative, says that the recent bill prohibiting same-sex marriage in Nigeria has ominous implications for a broad range of individual rights in the country…
International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo on Thursday urged international cooperation in executing arrest warrants for suspects accused in the Darfur conflict . Presenting his report to the UN Security Council , Ocampo emphasized that all states parties to the Rome Statute have an obligation to cooperate with the ICC. Following his report, [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor Stephen Halbrook, Counsel for the National Rifle Association in the case of Messerschmidt v. Millender, argues that the police violated clearly established gun ownership rights in seizing the guns of all those present within the searched premises without verifying that the suspect was among those persons…
There were only 78 new death sentences handed down in the US in 2011—the first time that number has dropped below 100 since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976—according to a report published Thursday by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) . There were 43 executions in 13 states in 2001, down from 46 [...]
The two-year sodomy trial of Malaysian opposition leader and former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim came to a close Thursday with the prosecution delivering its closing arguments. Under Malaysian law, sodomy is punishable by 20 years in prison regardless of consent. The charges against Anwar allege that he sodomized a former male political aide. This [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Phil Robertson, Deputy Director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch, says that the Peaceful Assembly Bill is a betrayal of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s earlier promises to bolster civil society through broadening respect for individual rights and enhancing democratic practices…
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Thursday that Syrian army commanders and officials have ordered troops to attack unarmed protesters in an all-out effort to stop public demonstrations. These allegations are detailed in an 88-page report based on more than 60 interviews with defectors from the Syrian military and intelligence agencies who describe, in specific detail, [...]
North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue on Wednesday vetoed legislation that would have essentially repealed the state’s Racial Justice Act . The 2009 law, which allows death row inmates to appeal their sentences based on statistical evidence of racism, was designed to address concerns that racial bias plays a role in sentencing. In an accompanying statement [...]
JURIST Managing Editor Dwyer Arce, University of Pittsburgh School of Law Class of 2012, is the 2011 Janavitz Fellow in First Amendment Law and serves as a Teaching Fellow in the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project. He argues that an interstate compact altering presidential elections missed a unique opportunity to partially remedy the denial of federal [...]
