The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Wednesday that YouTube is not a “state actor” for First Amendment purposes and thus the platform can exercise control over the content its users post. The conservative nonprofit group Prager University (PragerU) had complained that YouTube’s terms of use worked to censor the group’s right [...]
The US Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit on Wednesday upheld Texas’s winner-take-all system for awarding electoral college votes in presidential elections. The challengers, led by an organization called the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), had asserted that distributing all of Texas’s 38 electoral votes to the winner of the state’s popular vote, rather [...]
In a document released by the UN Human Rights Council on Monday, a Special Rapporteur analyzed the concept of “psychological torture” under human rights law. Ever since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the report says, the international community has done impressive work addressing its prohibition on torture. But “at the same time,” [...]
The US Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision in Hernandez v. Mesa on Tuesday, holding that the parents of a Mexican child who was shot and killed by a border official have no right to seek a remedy in American civil court. The child, Jesus Hernandez, had been playing with friends in a dry culvert [...]
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday sentenced Roger Stone, a longtime associate of President Donald Trump, to 40 months in prison. Stone was convicted last year of witness tampering and giving false statements to Congress in relation to investigations of Russian election interference. The circumstances [...]
A federal judge issued an order Tuesday allowing a case filed by South Carolina against the Trump administration over seismic testing for offshore oil exploration to proceed. Judge Richard Gergel dismissed several of South Carolina’s legal arguments but allowed the case to proceed under their claim that Trump’s executive order authorizing the exploration exceeded his [...]
The White House announced Tuesday that US President Donald Trump issued seven pardons and commuted the sentences of four individuals, including former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Blagojevich was indicted by federal prosecutors in 2008 for his attempt to personally profit from his ability to fill Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat. Blagojevich received a 14-year sentence. [...]
In a vote held by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Tuesday, employees at the crowdfunding tech company Kickstarter elected to unionize. The decision marks the first successful move toward worker organization at a major tech company, though similar efforts by contractors and employees in the industry have been advanced in recent years. The [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Wednesday in favor of an Oregon school district’s policy allowing transgender students to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity. A group of parents and students had sued to challenge the policy, arguing that it violated their constitutional rights to privacy and that [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit heard oral arguments on Tuesday in a case filed by gay conversion therapists who argue that the practice should be protected by the First Amendment. The Florida city of Boca Raton and Palm Beach County outlawed conversion therapy in 2017, part of a growing national and [...]
