The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday dismissed the last charge in a criminal case against former governor Rick Perry . The charge for abuse of official capacity under Texas Penal Code Sec. 39.02 was initiated when Perry threatened to and eventually vetoed funding for the Public Integrity Unit for the Travis County District [...]
More than 200 members of Congress filed an amici curiae brief in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Tuesday, challenging the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over regulations on carbon dioxide emissions. The Clean Power Plan (CPP) proposes an incremental decrease of power plant emissions by nearly a [...]
The Canadian Federal Court of Appeals has overturned a lower court decision , holding that accused Nazi war criminal Helmut Oberlander cannot be stripped of his Canadian citizenship at this time. Oberlander was an interpreter for Einsatzkommando 10a , a Nazi death squad responsible for killing two million people, but it is unknown if Oberlander [...]
The Oklahoma Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision Tuesday, upholding a law that restricts use of medication abortion drugs. The Oklahoma statute restricted the use of Mifeprex and misoprostol, abortion-medication drugs that are generally taken in conjunction with one another, to only those uses in line with “the FDA-approved final Mifeprex label” (Mifeprex and [...]
Israeli human rights groups HaMoked and B’Tselem released a report Wednesday detailing alleged mistreatment of detained Palestinians. The report, entitled “Backed by the System” , gives first hand accounts of abuse reportedly suffered by more than 100 detainees in at the Shikma Prison. The report found that many individuals were arrested at their homes after [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Tuesday that employers may no longer collect tips from service employees and share them with support staff even if the tipped employees are receiving minimum wage. 29 USC § 203(m) allows employers to use tips to apply to the minimum wage of an employee, called [...]
Amnesty International (AI) on Wednesday released its Annual Report 2015/16 , a summary of an international survey of human rights concluding that “short-term national self-interest and draconian security crackdowns have led to a wholesale assault on basic freedoms and rights.” AI attributes much of this failure to a lack of accountability in the international system, [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Meghan J. Ryan of Dedman School of Law, Associate Professor of Law, discusses the evolution and future of the death penalty… Capital punishment in this country has a long and storied history. In the early years, the colonies regularly executed criminal offenders for a variety of crimes, including arson, piracy, and sodomy. [...]
Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday vowed to block any Supreme Court nominee by President Obama . In a letter to the majority leader of the primarily-Republican Senate, all 11 of the Judiciary Committee’s Republicans promised to hold no hearings on a nominee until the new president is inaugurated in January. If Republicans [...]
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in cases dealing with damages for patent infringement and the Hobbs Act robbery statute. The consolidated cases of Stryker Corp. v. Zimmer and Halo Electronics, Inc. v. Pulse Electronics, Inc. involve the application of a rigid two-part test to assess damages in a patent infringement case under [...]
