President Joe Biden announced new measures Tuesday allowing hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrant spouses and children of US citizens to remain in the country while applying for permanent residency, thus enabling these families to stay together. Typically, noncitizen spouses are required to apply for spousal visas from abroad — a lengthy bureaucratic process. Though [...]

A coalition of advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday challenging a new Biden administration rule that effectively bans many asylum seekers from protection based on where and how they entered the US. On June 4, President Joe Biden signed an executive order barring asylum claims from most migrants who cross the US-Mexico border [...]

The US Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously struck down a bid by pro-life advocates to restrict the availability of abortion drug Mifepristone. Reproductive rights laws have shifted wildly in the two years since the US Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that held abortion was a constitutionally enshrined right. In [...]

The European Court of Human Rights ruled on Thursday that Italy violated the rights of a man who was held in psychiatric detention for nearly a decade, in violation of the country’s legislative shift toward deinstitutionalization. The case was brought by Fabio Cramesteter, who was convicted in 2003 on weapons possession and theft charges. The [...]

Jury selection began Monday in a federal firearms case against Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden. The younger Biden faces three federal charges related to false statements he allegedly made in order to purchase a gun in 2018. He was required under federal law to provide a written statement attesting that he was not [...]

The alleged gunman implicated in the recent attack on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has been formally charged with attempted premeditated murder, high-ranking officials said during a press conference on Thursday, during which they also described the attack as politically motivated. Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok described the attacker as a “lone wolf” and said [...]

The US Department of Justice determined that Nebraska is violating the civil rights of residents with serious mental illnesses by unnecessarily segregating them into institutional settings. The case emerged from complaints by Nebraskans that the state was improperly subjecting mental health patients to segregation from general society, in violation of Title II of the Americans [...]

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot multiple times on Wednesday, and remains in critical condition. In a statement to JURIST, the Slovak Government said: Today, during the government’s off-site meeting in Handlova, an assassination attempt was made on the Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic, Robert Fico. He is currently in critical condition and [...]

Georgia’s parliament on Tuesday adopted a controversial law designating civil society organizations that receive funding from abroad as “foreign agents.” The law stipulates that civil society organizations receiving more than 20 percent of their funding from international donors must formally register as foreign agents — a term that evokes images of Cold War-era espionage. The legislative [...]

A class action complaint filed this week accuses New York prison officials of holding disabled inmates in solitary confinement in violation of state law. Solitary confinement has been a core feature of the US penal system since the 18th century — dating back to the earliest state prisons, where the inmates seen as most depraved [...]