The New Hampshire House of Representatives voted Tuesday to legalize recreational marijuana . After a committee recommendation that the lawmakers kill the bill, the House voted against killing the bill. The House then voted 207-139 to pass an amended version of the bill that would allow adults to cultivate up to six plants at home, [...]
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, filed two defamation lawsuits on Monday regarding BuzzFeed’s publication of the Steele Dossier , a condemning but unsubstantiated report indicating collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian agents. The first suit names BuzzFeed along with four staffers as defendants for the publication of the materials and was filed [...]
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights on Wednesday issued a unanimous advisory opinion that member states “must recognize and guarantee all the rights that are derived from a family bond between people of the same sex.” The ruling establishes that couples in same-sex marriages have the same family and financial rights as heterosexual couples. Due [...]
A three-judge panel in the US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina struck down North Carolina’s 2016 congressional redistricting plan Tuesday. The case was brought by consolidated plaintiffs Common Cause and the League of Women Voters of North Carolina , among others, who argued that the districts constitute a partisan gerrymander in [...]
Judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which gives undocumented immigrants brought into the US as children, known as “Dreamers,” protection from deportation. In September the Trump administration announced plans to [...]
Eight states have filed an amicus brief in a case concerning a 17-year-old undocumented immigrant’s attempt to obtain an abortion without parental consent while in government custody. Arkansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and South Carolina argue that minor undocumented immigrants have no right to an abortion in the US because of their immigration [...]
The US Supreme Court heard two Fourth Amendment cases Tuesday involving the search of motor vehicles. In the first case, Byrd v. United States , the court heard arguments as to whether a driver has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a rental car when that individual is not listed as an authorized driver in [...]
A US federal judge on Monday terminated a consent decree requiring the Republican National Committee (RNC) to get court approval for any “ballot security” measures it planned to implement. Judge John Michael Vazquez of the US District Court for the District of New Jersey found that the DNC had failed to prove that the RNC [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a 72-page report on Monday documenting widespread discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) individuals in Ghana both in public and private or family settings. The report, titled “No Choice but to Deny Who I Am: Violence and Discrimination against LGBT People in Ghana,” highlights that § 104(1)(b) of [...]
US authorities are deliberately concealing information about how they obtained evidence in criminal proceedings, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report Tuesday. HRW divulged findings from over a year of investigating a police practice known as “parallel construction,” in which law enforcement illegally obtain evidence and then hide the illegality through legally obtaining supporting [...]
