The US Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Massachusetts law creating a 35-foot protester-free buffer zone around the entrance or driveway of an abortion clinic is unconstitutional. In McCullen v. Coakley the court considered the questions of whether the buffer zone, created by the Reproductive Health Care Facilities Act , violated the First Amendment to [...]
UN Special Rapporteurs on torture and the right to health, Juan Mendez and Anand Grover, on Wednesday urged the Knesset , the Israeli Parliament, to withdraw proposed amendments to the Prisons Act which would allow the forced feeding and medical treatment of inmates currently participating in a hunger strike. A large number of Palestinian prisoners [...]
Defense counsel for convicted war criminal Germain Katanga discontinued their appeal Wednesday, effectively finalizing the International Criminal Court’s judgment against him in March. Katanga, the alleged commander of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) rebel group Force de refsistance patriotique en Ituri (FRPI) was found guilty of four counts of war crimes and one [...]
Three UN rights experts on Wednesday condemned the city of Detroit’s Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) disconnection of water services for failure to pay due to lack of means as a violation of human rights. The experts’ criticism comes in response to a report submitted by the Detroit People’s Water Board, the Blue Planet Project, [...]
A judge for the US District Court for the District of Oregon ruled Tuesday that the government’s practice of adding people to a no-fly list is unconstitutional. US District Judge Anna Brown ruled that the list, which bans people from commercial flights due to alleged links to terrorism, violates a person’s constitutional rights because it [...]
A panel of judges sitting for the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit on Wednesday upheld a lower court’s ruling striking down Utah’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The US District Court for the District of Utah struck down Utah’s constitutional and statutory bans on same-sex marriage in December, holding that such bans [...]
A former accountant for Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges connected to Madoff’s multibillion dollar Ponzi scheme. Paul Konigsberg, a 78-year-old former senior tax partner at Konigsberg Wolf & Co and the last defendant in the Madoff prosecutions, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and two counts of falsifying records of a broker-dealer. [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Harrison Thorne, Loyola Law School, Class of 2016, addresses newly decided precedents in patent law and the complications that they could create… It is not always clear exactly when a patent is infringed. People typically think of infringement in a black and white manner as the unauthorized use of another person’s invention. [...]
A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana on Wednesday struck down Indiana’s ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional. Three lawsuits, including one filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of 15 people, all sought to challenge parts of Indiana Code Section 31-11-1-1 , which bans all [...]
The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday in Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeffer that employees of Fifth Third Bank can proceed with a lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duties over an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). As part of the benefits Fifth Third offers to employees, they are able to contribute to an ESOP that [...]
