A federal judge on Thursday sentenced civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart to 10 years in prison, increasing her original sentence of 28 months. Stewart was convicted by a jury in 2005 on charges of conspiracy, giving material support to terrorists and defrauding the US government for smuggling messages from convicted terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman to members [...]

Goldman, Sachs & Co. on Thursday agreed to a $550 million settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to resolve charges that they marketed a subprime mortgage product and made misleading statements and omissions to investors in early 2007. Of the $550 million settlement, $300 million will be paid to the US Treasury [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Thursday upheld the torture convictions and sentence of Charles McArthur Emmanuel, son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor . Emmanuel was sentenced last year to 97 years in prison after being convicted in 2008 on charges that he was involved in torture and other crimes [...]

The US Senate on Thursday voted 60-39 in favor of comprehensive financial reform legislation , sending it to President Barack Obama . The vote on the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 occurred after Democrats garnered the support of Republican Senators Scott Brown (MA), Olympia Snowe (ME) and Susan Collins (ME) , securing the [...]

Andrew Vogeler, Pitt Law ’12 and Nordenberg Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Private and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany, writes about attempts to harmonize contract law in the European Union… Lately, there has been much debate over the proper direction of the European Union in response to the ongoing fiscal and [...]

Kyrgyz interim President Roza Otunbayeva on Thursday issued a decree establishing a commission to investigate last month’s ethnic violence against the country’s Uzbek population. The commission is comprised of 30 former government officials , human rights activists and professors, headed by former parliament speaker Abdygany Erkebayev. It will consult with government and international experts and [...]

A senior defense lawyer at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was shot dead outside of his home Tuesday night. Police say Jwani Mwaikusa was killed , along with his nephew and neighbor, and that the attackers then ransacked Mwaikusa’s car, taking a briefcase and some documents. Mwaikusa worked as a defense counsel for [...]

Former Democratic Party fundraiser Hassan Nemazee was sentenced Thursday to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty in March to charges of bank fraud and wire fraud relating to his orchestration of $292 million pyramid scheme. The federal judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York also ordered Nemazee to [...]

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals on Thursday ruled 5-4 that the DC Charter was not violated when city officials refused to allow a ballot initiative on same-sex marriage . The court, affirming a ruling of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia , found that DC’s Human Rights Act (HRA) did not [...]

A Gambian court on Thursday sentenced eight men—six former army officers and two former high-ranking government officials—to death for their roles in a 2009 coup attempt. The men were charged in March with conspiring to overthrow the government of President Yahya Jammeh . The men were found guilty of treason after the prosecution was able [...]