Richard C. Dieter : "There is no question that treaties that have been signed and ratifed by the U.S. government are the "law of the land" and can be binding on states with the same force as federal law. The U.S. is bound by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and by the decision of [...]
The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that a 2005 state law aimed at prosecuting smugglers hired to ferry illegal immigrants across the border into the US can also be used to prosecute the illegal immigrants. The judge rejected arguments that the law infringed on the powers of the federal government to regulate immigration. The [...]
A judge for the London High Court on Thursday ordered a British man to pay approximately $44,000 in damages for creating a fake profile on social networking website Facebook and posting defaming information about an acquaintance, Mathew Firsht. The judge found that the postings were libelous regarding both Firsht and a business he operates, and [...]
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) said during a Committee hearing Friday that providing inducements to those who hold liens was the only practical legislative solution to the country's so-called "sub-prime mortgage collapse," and that House legislation passed Wednesday will effectively provide those inducements. The Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008 provides for government [...]
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled on Friday that the right of EU citizens to live in any EU member state also extends to non-citizen spouses and relatives. Four Irish couples brought the case, appealing deportation orders issued by the Irish Ministry of Justice, Equality and Law Reform because one member of each couple [...]
Bryan McCann : "Two years ago, a fellow anti-death penalty activist and I participated in a public debate on the University of Texas campus with the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT). No one was surprised when the YCT's first plan of attack was to read – verbatim – a detailed account of the particularly gruesome [...]
A Maryland judge Thursday rejected a challenge seeking to remove a referendum on a transgender anti-discrimination law from the November ballot. Circuit Court Judge Robert A. Greenberg ruled that the Montgomery County Board of Elections had miscalculated the number of signatures that proponents needed to gather before the referendum could be certified. However, Greenberg also [...]
An Argentine court sentenced former general Luciano Benjamin Menendez and four others to life in prison on Thursday for the 1977 kidnapping, torture, and killing of four political dissidents during the country's so-called "Dirty War" . Three others have been sentenced to extended jail terms since the case went to trial in May . Menendez, [...]
Lawyers and professors testified before the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Thursday that the government process used to arrest and convict illegal immigrants in Iowa in May was illegal and violated the immigrants' due process rights. In May, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials raided an Agriprocessors Inc. meatpacking plant in Iowa [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor David Crane of Syracuse University College of Law, former Chief Prosecutor for the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, says that the declaration by recently-arrested Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic that he will defend himself before the ICTY at The Hague is an historically-predictable bid to control, play up and [...]
