A judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia issued an order late Thursday allowing the military to resume force feeding a Syrian prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, stating that “the court is in no position to make the complex medical decisions necessary” to keep the prisoner alive. In the order, US District [...]

The Appropriations Committee of the California State Senate on Friday voted 5-2 to pass a measure requiring distributors of bottled or canned sugary drinks to fix warning labels to the beverage container before sale. The warning label required by the bill reads: “STATE OF CALIFORNIA SAFETY WARNING: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Jason Samuel, Penn State Dickinson School of Law Class of 2014, explores the constitutional framework surrounding the annexation of Crimea by Russia…When the Alma-Ata Declaration was signed on December 21, 1991, 10 nations separated from the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) and became independent states. In 2001, a new [...]

Malawi President Joyce Banda announced Saturday that, due to extreme irregularities in the voting process, she is nullifying the national tripartite results for the presidential, parliamentary and local elections. President Banda cited as her authority Section 88(2) of the Malawi Constitution, which states that the president shall have the responsibility to “provide executive leadership in [...]

The Court of Cassation in Egypt today sentenced 19 supporters of the formerly ousted president Mohammed Morsi to five years in prison for rioting last year outside the Al-Azhar Islamic institution . It has been reported that the supporters were accused of assaulting civil servants, damaging public property, blocking roads and displaying unwarranted aggression to [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit rejected on Friday challenges to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) plan to expand broadband Internet service to rural areas. The FCC’s plan is a $4.5 billion program which subsidizes high-speed Internet services in high-cost rural areas. The challengers of the FCC plan included many phone companies [...]

Six couples filed a federal lawsuit Thursday challenging South Dakota’s ban on same-sex marriage . The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of South Dakota , challenges a law passed by the legislature in 1996 and a constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2006. The suit claims that the laws violate [...]

The US House of Representatives voted 303-121 Thursday to approve a bill that would curb the powers of the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect phone records. The USA Freedom Act would end the bulk collection of phone records and instead require the NSA to query phone companies about individual suspicious phone numbers. Supporters have [...]

The International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday sentenced Congolese militia leader Germain Katanga to 12 years in prison for war crimes. Katanga, the alleged commander of the Patriotic Resistance Forces in Ituri, an armed militia group from the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was convicted in March on four counts [...]

British Petroleum (BP) announced Wednesday that it will appeal a recent US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decision to the US Supreme Court . The March decision by the Fifth Circuit rejected BP’s claim that payments to alleged oil spill victims claiming economic losses should be excluded because the damages were not traceable [...]