JURIST Contributing Editor Marjorie Cohn of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law aruges that the Turkish government must stop the violence against its own people…

A judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday struck down a law banning protests and demonstrations in the plaza of the US Supreme Court. Enacted in 1949, the law served to protect the grounds from vandalism but also prohibited processions, parades and the display of banners supporting a particular [...]

The government of the Canadian province of Quebec introduced a bill Wednesday that would permit doctors to provide patients with medical aid to die. Quebec Social Services Minister Veronique Hivon introduced the bill before the National Assembly . The proposed law provides special rules on the administration and consent requirements regarding medical aid to die [...]

A federal judge on Tuesday struck down a Colorado law that would have required businesses to place marijuana related magazines behind counters. Judge Richard Matsch of the US District Court for the District of Colorado ordered a permanent injunction against Amendment 64 which would have treated marijuana related magazines similarly to pornographic material. The ruling [...]

The Russian State Duma on Tuesday approveda bill that would criminalize the dissemination of materials supporting “non-traditional sexual relations” by a vote of 436-0, with one abstention. There are 450 seats in the lower parliamentary house, and critics believe this is a move towards reinforcing a heteronormative society led by the Russian Orthodox Church . [...]

Thousands of Turkish lawyers on Wednesday joined the ongoing protests in Ankara and Istanbul by marching out of courthouses in black robes. This came as the result of incidents occurring during the protests on Tuesday, where a number of lawyers were handcuffed and dragged on the ground by police officers. Prosecutors in Istanbul had begun [...]

The High Court in Dublin on Wednesday ordered several Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to file-sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB) and its proxy servers within 30 days. TPB is one of the largest free providers of BitTorrent material in the world, reporting more than 36 billion dollars in revenue last year from [...]

Justice Hassan Bubacar Jallow , Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on Tuesday reiterated the UN Security Council’s request for member states to help bring to justice nine fugitives allegedly responsible for war crimes during the 1994 Rwandan genocide . Jallow urged the men to turn themselves in and stated that there [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit on Tuesday ruled that an Oklahoma man had stated a First Amendment compelled speech claim when he challenged Oklahoma’s “rain god” license plates. Oklahoma’s standard vehicle license plates depict a sculpture of a Native American shooting an arrow toward the sky, “hoping the ‘spirit world’ or [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Nebraska filed a lawsuit Monday against Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman and the Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles challenging the governor’s decision to deny driver’s licenses to young people who have been legally authorized to remain in the country by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [...]