A judge for the Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday ruled that the state’s system for tenure and seniority for public school teachers is unconstitutional. The plaintiffs, nine California public school students, challenged five provisions of the California Education Code that provide teachers employed for more than 18 months with strong job security and [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on Wednesday refused to grant an injunction that would have exempted Catholic non-profit groups from the contraception coverage requirements of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) . The court noted in its decision that the groups that brought the suit, including the Michigan Catholic [...]

An Egyptian court on Wednesday sentenced a prominent activist from the 2011 revolution to 15 years in prison for organizing an unsanctioned protest and assaulting a police officer last year. Activist and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah was forced to wait outside of a courtroom at Cairo’s Torah Prison while he was tried in absentia inside. [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Sandy Davidson of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and School of Law discusses removal of a person’s past information from the Internet and the potential slippery slope this creates … By recognizing in May “the right to be forgotten,” the European Union’s Court of Justice has stirred the Internet reform [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Colombia Circuit on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit brought by a former Guantanamo detainee against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld . According to the original complaint the plaintiff, Sami Abdulaziz Allaithi, was an Egyptian professor working in Kabul teaching English. When the US started its bombing campaign, [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Tuesday that creating a searchable book database and giving full digital copies of books to disabled people constitutes fair use. The Authors Guild sued HathiTrust , Cornell University and the presidents of four other universities over a claim that the defendants were infringing their copyright [...]

A Chinese court on Tuesday denied bail to prominent human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, who is likely to be indicted in the country’s attempt to deter growing legal activism. The lawyer was detained last month for “causing a disturbance” after he attended a weekend meeting that urged an investigation into the 1989 crackdown of pro-democracy [...]

The US Department of Justice on Tuesday announced support for a proposal that could reduce the sentences of nonviolent drug offenders in federal prisons. Attorney General Eric Holder requested that the proposed law be applied retroactively to felons who lacked significant criminal histories and whose offenses did not include aggravating factors. However, this reduction would [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Texas released a report Tuesday exposing the results of a multi-year investigation into conditions at five Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prisons in Texas. There are 13 CAR prisons in the US—privately run prisons that house only non-citizens, most of whom have only been convicted of [...]

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay delivered her final address to the UN Human Rights Council as High Commissioner for Human Rights Tuesday. Pillay, a South African national, took up the post of High Commissioner in 2008, two years after the formation of the UN Humans Right Council. In her remarks the commissioner [...]