The twenty-fifth session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) opened Monday amid calls for stronger protections for activists calling out human rights violations. In her opening remarks , the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay urged states to take a proactive approach to the protection of human rights, especially in light of [...]

Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the son-in-law of Osama Bin-Laden , went on trial Monday in New York for his role in the 9/11 attacks. Judge Lewis Kaplan of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York instructed Abu Ghaith to face prospective jurors, in order to determine whether any of the prospective jurors [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday denied review of two cases involving local ordinances that sought to deny housing to undocumented immigrants. The court’s denial will will let stand lower court rulings that the ordinances are unconstitutional and prohibited from taking effect in their proposed locations of Hazleton, Pennsylvania and Farmers Branch, Texas . The [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday on the legal standard for assessing whether an individual is mentally retarded in order to determine that person’s eligibility for the death penalty. In Hall v. Florida the court will decide “whether the Florida scheme for identifying mentally retarded defendants in capital cases violates Atkins v. Virginia [...]

Five veterans of the Vietnam War filed a class action lawsuit on Monday in the US District Court for the District of Connecticut accusing the military of failing to upgrade the discharges of veterans who developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The complaint , which names the US Army, Navy and Air Force as defendants, argues [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the Eastern District of California ruled Friday that two state laws are unconstitutional because they alter the sentences of crimes that were committed before the laws came into effect. Marsy’s Law , otherwise known as the “Victims’ Bill of Rights,” was passed in 2008, mandating that inmates [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Shanshan Liu, American University Washington College of Law Class of 2015 explores the legal analysis surrounding current antitrust litigation in regards to online search engines and monopolization… The field of antitrust litigation has focused on the settlement between the world’s largest search engine, Google Inc. (Google) and the European Union Commission (EU [...]

A gun and suicide bomb attack on Monday on a court complex in Islamabad, Pakistan, left 11 people dead and 25 injured. Additional Sessions Judge Rafaqat Awan, senior advocate Rao Abdul Rashid, advocate Tanveer Ahmend Shah, and several other members of court staff were among those killed in the first suicide attack in Islamabad since [...]

Croatia said Monday at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that acts of violence committed by Serbia in the 1990s constituted genocide under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide . The Convention was breached, Croatia argues , when forces from the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia tried to [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday granted certiorari in five cases slated for argument during the October 2014 term. In Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk , the court will address whether time spent passing through post-work security screenings is compensable in the form of overtime pay pursuant to the Fair Labor Standards Act . On [...]