The lower house of the German Parliament voted 393-226 Friday to legalize same-sex marriage. The decision came shortly after Chancellor Angela Merkel changed her conservative stance on the issue. Although Merkel voted against the move she encouraged lawmakers to vote with their conscience instead of along party lines. Before allowing civil unions in 2001, Germany [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on Wednesday reversed a previous ruling that Ohio’s execution protocol was unconstitutional. The prior ruling had put further executions on hiatus. The question was whether one of the three drugs used in the lethal injection process was sufficient to cause the inmates to lose consciousness before [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Wednesday upheld North Carolina’s Senate Bill 2 , which allows magistrates to refuse to perform same-sex marriages if doing so would conflict with their religious beliefs. The court ruled that the plaintiffs, three couples, did not have standing to bring the case because they could [...]
The Ohio Senate voted 24-9 Wednesday to approve SB 145 , a bill the criminalizes a common second-trimester abortion procedure. The bill specifically targets dilation and evacuation (D&E) which is usually performed after the twelfth week of pregnancy. During a D&E a woman’s cervix is dilated and the fetus is removed with suction and surgical [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Julie A. Hill of The University of Alabama School of Law, discusses the Financial Choice Act and duplicative enforcement of financial regulations … After the L.A. Times revealed that Wells Fargo employees opened millions of unauthorized consumer accounts, the bank faced multiple investigations and fines. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) fined [...]
The US Department of State on Wednesday issued guidelines for the modified travel ban allowed by the US Supreme Court earlier this week. The order permits denying visas to travelers from six predominantly Muslim countries unless the visitor has a “bona fide relationship” with a business or close family member but the court did not [...]
In the 2017 Trafficking in Persons Report released on Tuesday, the US State Department downgraded China to Tier 3, which is the lowest tier for human trafficking. Tier 3 represents “countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so. China joins 22 other countries [...]
The Hague Appeals Court on Tuesday upheld a lower court’s decision that Dutch peacekeepers were 30 percent responsible for the deaths of 300 Muslim males who were turned away from a Dutch UN base in 1995 when the area surrounding the base was overrun with Bosnian Serb troops. In the ruling, Presiding Judge Gepke Dulek-Schermers [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Ohud Ali. Alzahrani of the University of Pittsburgh discusses the overdue abolition of a long held guardianship system for the women in Saudi Arabia … Women have recently gained some rights in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (referred to hereafter as KSA). Currently, the women of Saudi Arabia do not have full [...]
The Supreme Court of Canada upheld an order on Wednesday that directed Google to block a company’s website from is global search results. The ruling stems from a suit brought by a small technology company, Equustek Solutions Inc, who asserted that Datalink Technologies Gateways had committed copyright infringement by relabeling and selling one of Equustek’s [...]
