Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant on Monday signed into law the country’s strictest abortion law, prompting Mississippi’s only abortion clinic to file a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi challenging the Act’s constitutionality and requesting it be immediately blocked. The Gestational Age Act bans abortions when the fetus is 15 [...]
The US District Court for the Middle of Pennsylvania on Monday dismissed the lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania Republican legislators seeking to throw out the new electoral map designed by the state Supreme Court. Also on Monday, the US Supreme Court denied a separate appeal from the original Pennsylvania Supreme Court case that resulted in the [...]
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein on Monday said the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) violated human rights law after a report emerged that the DRC severely restricted and violently suppressed the right to freedom of peaceful assembly since early 2017. The report documents killings and other serious human rights [...]
UN human rights experts on Monday called for the immediate release of two human rights defenders in Iran after reports emerged that the two defenders had been subjected to beatings in detention. Atena Daemi and Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee were allegedly transferred from prisons after being ill-treated. They subsequently staged hunger strikes in protest against their [...]
The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty in Arizona under the Eighth Amendment. Abel Hidalgo was sentenced to death for two counts of first degree murder in 2015. He appealed to the Supreme Court of Arizona, which upheld the death sentence and found that [...]
The US Supreme Court on Monday granted certiorari in Nielsen v. Preap to rule on the mandatory detention of noncitizens who are released from criminal custody. The question before the court is whether, “a criminal alien becomes exempt from mandatory detention under 8 USC § 1226(c) if, after the alien is released from criminal custody, [...]
JUIRST Guest Columnist Benjamin G. Davis of the University of Toledo College of Law discusses the potential implications of Gina Haspel as CIA Director Designate…. I. Ah, if the Obama Administration had only followed my advice! November 15, 2016, after teaching class in Toledo, I had driven overnight from Toledo with a student, Victor Aberdeen, [...]
Here’s the international legal news we covered this week: Peru’s Congress voted by a wide margin on Thursday to begin impeachment proceedings against President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski for a second time in three months. Congress voted 87-15 in favor of admitting the impeachment motion with 15 abstentions. The US Treasury Department imposed new economic sanctions [...]
Here’s the domestic legal news we covered this week: The US Treasury Department imposed new economic sanctions Thursday on 19 Russian individuals and five entities for their interference in the 2016 US election, and a number of other destructive cyber-attacks. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Thursday vacated the Department of [...]
Peru’s Congress voted by a wide margin on Thursday to begin impeachment proceedings against President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski for a second time in three months. Congress voted 87-15 in favor of admitting the impeachment motion with 15 abstentions. Lawmakers are attempting to impeach Kuczynski over his ties to the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht , which [...]
