JURIST Guest Columnist John W. Klinker of Loyola University Chicago School of Law discusses how the decision in Montanile potentially creates a precedent that could affect the funding of welfare benefit plans… A common term in welfare benefit plans establishes an agreement whereby the plan will pay covered medical expenses of an employee when the [...]
UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women Dubravka Šimonović on Wednesday applauded efforts by Georgia to reform its laws on gender equality and violence against women but cautioned that significant social changes will need to occur to make the laws effective. Šimonović specifically noted that the mentality surrounding domestic violence and early marriages still creates [...]
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. [...]
