US President George W. Bush issued an executive order on Thursday which gives the country's Director of National Intelligence the authority to coordinate information sharing between different US and foreign intelligence services, a duty previously held by the Central Intelligence Agency . The Director will also be authorized to make funding decisions for the various US [...]
A judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia Thursday rejected arguments that senior White House officials are protected from congressional subpoena by executive privilege, ruling that former White House legal counsel Harriet Miers must testify before a House committee regarding the US Attorneys firing scandal . Judge John Bates did find [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit on Wednesday granted prosecutors' petition for an en banc rehearing on whether the insider trading conviction of former Qwest Communications CEO Joseph Nacchio should be overturned. In March, a Tenth Circuit panel struck down Nacchio's conviction and ordered a new trial, finding that US District Judge [...]
The South African Constitutional Court on Thursday rejected a motion by politician Jacob Zuma to exclude evidence from his upcoming corruption trial. Zuma had argued that evidence seized in 2005 raids by the Directorate of Special Investigations should be thrown out because the raids violated his rights to privacy and a fair trial. The court [...]
Committee on the Judiciary, US House of Representatives v. Harriet Miers, et al., US District Court for the District of Columbia, July 31, 2008 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
The Alabama Supreme Court voted 5-4 on Wednesday to indefinitely stay the execution of Thomas Arthur , who had been sentenced to death by lethal injection for a 1982 contract killing. Arthur would have been executed on Thursday. The court did not disclose its reason for the stay, but the decision comes after lawyers for [...]
California Attorney General Jerry Brown formally notified the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Thursday that the state would file a lawsuit against the agency if it refused to issue rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions from ships, aircraft, industrial and agricultural machinery, and other vehicles. Brown said that California had petitioned the EPA three times seeking a [...]
Officials for United Airlines filed a lawsuit Wednesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois seeking to ban pilots' union Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) and four pilots from causing flight cancellations. The suit alleges that ALPA and the pilots have organized sick-leave abuse movements in protest to United plans to [...]
Bosnian Serb leader and former fugitive Radovan Karadzic Friday refused to enter a plea and denied the assistance of counsel in his first appearance before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) , where he faces war crimes charges . Karadzic was originally indicted by the court's prosecutor in 1995, but had been [...]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced Wednesday that a Native American prisoner in Wyoming had settled his lawsuit against the Wyoming Department of Corrections after Department officials agreed to allow the man to keep up to four eagle feathers in his cell for religious purposes. Andrew John Yellowbear, a member of the Northern Arapaho [...]
