A coalition of 17 states and the District of Columbia have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its policy to separate immigrant children from their families and refusal to allow asylum applicants entry along Southwestern border ports. The complaint describes reports of families who have sought asylum only to be unlawfully refused at [...]
US Legal News
A three-judge federal panel ruled 2-1 on Tuesday that the Virginia General Assembly violated the Equal Protection Clause by engaging in racial gerrymandering. The plaintiffs alleged that the General Assembly “predominantly relied on race” when drawing up 12 majority African-American voting districts for the 2011 election. The US Supreme Court previously upheld the voting plan [...]
Judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed a suit on Monday against several oil companies, including Chevron Corporation and Exxon Mobil Corporation . The suit, brought by the state of California and the city of Oakland, alleged that the oil companies were a “public nuisance” under federal [...]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Monday supplemented its lawsuit with a memorandum in support of a preliminary injunction to block the Trump administration from separating asylum-seeking immigrant parents from their children and to order the administration to reunite separated families. The ACLU urges the court issue this preliminary injunction, arguing that Trump’s executive [...]
The US Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a regulation requiring crisis pregnancy centers to give women certain information concerning free or low-cost abortion services and disclose if the center was unlicensed to provide medical services was unconstitutional. In a 5-4 ruling in NIFLA v. Becerra , the court decided that the California Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency [...]
The US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Tuesday in Trump v. Hawaii that President Donald Trump’s proclamation restricting entry from particular Muslim-majority countries was within in his authority. The court also found that plaintiffs challenging the proclamation were unlikely to succeed on their claim that the ban violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Chief [...]
The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear the appeal of Brendan Dassey , subject of Netflix’s hit docu-series Making a Murderer . In 2007, at age 17, Dassey was tried as an adult along with Steven Avery and found guilty of first degree intentional homicide, rape and mutilation of a corpse for the murder of [...]
The US Supreme Court held Monday that steering practices by the credit card company American Express that contractually barred merchant customers from steering cardholder customers to credit cards with lower prices are not a violation of federal antitrust law. In Ohio v. American Express Co. , a group of states argued that under Section 1 [...]
On Monday the US Supreme Court added seven more cases to its October docket. Also notable, the Court denied a North Carolina political redistricting question and one of a Washington florist who refused to provide flowers for a gay couple’s wedding on First Amendment grounds, sending them back to lower courts consistent with its recent [...]
The US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Monday that Texas’ federal congressional and state legislative districts were not a racial gerrymander against minority voters with respect to three challenged districts, overturning a lower court ruling . The court did rule one of the districts is an impermissible racial gerrymander. Abbott v. Perez concerned two consolidated cases [...]
