Stephen Bainbridge : "Now that Congress has approved the legislation to give federal courts jurisdiction over the Terry Schiavo case, I am finding myself oddly unable to reach a definitive assessment of that action. As I see it, Congress' act implicates four first principles I hold dear: The culture of life; Limited government; Federalism; The [...]

CBS-10 TV in Tampa is reporting that US District Judge James Whittemore has ended this afternoon's hearing on Terri Schiavo's parents' petition for the re-insertion of her feeding tube pending a federal hearing of her case without making a ruling or even setting a timeframe for a ruling. Attorneys appearing before Judge Whittemore made impassioned [...]

Leading Monday's corporations and securities law news, former HealthSouth Corp. chief financial officer Weston Smith has testified that former CEO Richard Scrushy made all decisions at the company. The testimony undermines Scrushy's defense that he was unaware of the massive accounting fraud at the company. Read the Scrushy indictment . Reuters has more. In other [...]

In Monday's environmental law news, facing a declining tiger population, India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has banned gifts of live tigers to foreign dignitaries, established a wildlife crime prevention bureau, and created a taskforce of forest officials, wildlife experts and community leaders to report on the status of the tiger population. There are an estimated [...]

A UK government minister said Monday that Camilla Parker Bowles can become queen after Prince Charles ascends to the British throne. Christopher Leslie, minister responsible for the UK Department for Constitutional Affairs answered a lawmaker's written question about Parker Bowles' status by saying the marriage of Charles and Parker Bowles would not be "morganatic" where [...]

Estonian prime minister Juhan Parts dissolved his government and announced his resignation Monday after parliament voted no-confidence in Justice Minister Ken-Marti Vaher and a controversial new anti-corruption plan. Vaher's plan had called for a system of quotas for the number of corruption cases regional prosecutors would have to hear every year. Parliament felt Vaher's proposed [...]

US Senator John Cornyn , a senior Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sunday introduced a resolution expressing the sense of the Senate that judicial decisions regarding the US Constitution should not be influenced by foreign law. The purpose of SR 92 would be to discourage the use of foreign precedent in deciding constitutional [...]

Iceland's parliament voted unanimously Monday to grant citizenship to US chess champion Bobby Fischer . Fischer is currently being detained in Japan, and faced possible deportation to the US, where he is wanted for violating international sanctions by playing a chess match in Yugoslavia. Attaining Icelandic citizenship means that Fischer may avoid prosecution by being [...]

The White House on Monday insisted that the special legislation passed by Congress in a matter of hours over the weekend regarding review of Terri Schiavo's case was not intended as a precedent for Congress to step into future battles over the fate of simiilarly disabled or ill patients. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist had [...]

The Pew Hispanic Center , a private research group, released a report Monday documenting recent massive growth of the illegal immigrant population in the United States. A 23 percent increase was reported in the population of undocumented residents over the past four years, from 8.4 to 10.3 million people. The report largely attributes the increase [...]