US Secretary of State Mike Pomepo announced at a press conference on Monday that the US will reverse its long-standing stance on Israeli settlements in the West Bank region, no longer holding that the settlements violate international law. The West Bank has been a zone of contention since Israel occupied the region following the Six [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday granted a request from the Trump administration to stay a court order requiring the president’s tax returns be turned over to the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Written by Chief Justice Roberts, the stay is in effect until “further ordered,” giving the court more time to consider [...]

The North Carolina Legislature enacted a new congressional map Friday in response to a ruling that declared that the 2017 map was in violation of the North Carolina Constitution. The newly enacted map for the 2020 election passed the legislature via a party-line vote of 65-24. The new map could give the North Carolina Republicans [...]

Months after the landmark opioid trial, an Oklahoma judge reduced the $572 million verdict against Johnson & Johnson (J&J) to $465 million Friday. According to the order, the $107 million reduction is due to a calculation error. Back in April the State of Oklahoma alleged that J&J’s false and misleading marketing practices contributed to the [...]

There’s a joke about a group of friends finishing up their meal at a local restaurant. One friend puts down the cutlery, pushes back the chair, and declares with conviction: “this food was bad and the portions were too small.” And so it is with the Paris Climate Change agreement. The Paris Agreement is bad [...]

Pennsylvania prisoners reached a settlement with the state Department of Corrections on Monday, ending solitary confinement and other isolationist policies for inmates sentenced to death. The settlement was a response to a January 2018 suit filed by five inmates and their attorneys. The attorneys worked with the American Civil Liberties Union and Abolitionist Law Center to [...]

The US Supreme Court granted review for four petitions from its private conference on Friday, including a copyright dispute between Google and Oracle. Google v. Oracle is a copyright case involving computer code. In this case, Google used “prewritten libraries” of code for the Java platform to develop its Android platform. The primary question in this [...]

Protests have broken out across Iran after President Hassan Rouhani announced Friday that petrol will be rationed and the government subsidy will be reduced, causing prices to increase by over 50 percent. Under the new plan, the government has stated that the excess funds created by the price increase will be redistributed to those families [...]

The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas stayed the execution of death row inmate Rodney Reed on Friday, remanding the case to the trial court for further development. Reed was convicted in 1996 of the murder of Stacey Stites and was set for lethal injection on Wednesday evening. Stites, 19, was strangled, and her body [...]

Everything old is new again, and court-packing is no exception. In 1937, faced with a conservative Supreme Court that consistently invalidated his New Deal legislation, President Roosevelt announced a plan to increase the size of the court and add justices who would rule in his favor. It was a bridge too far. While Roosevelt’s plan [...]