The Swiss Federal Counsel on Wednesday announced proposals to restrict the country's assisted suicide laws. The new guidelines will seek to prevent assisted suicide becoming a profit-driven business and to ensure that it is only available to the terminally ill. One of the proposals imposes criminal liability on those who assist unless certain stipulations are [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Christian Henderson of Oxford Brookes University (UK) says that although President Obama has made reforms in a number of areas since taking office last November, he has yet to distinguish his administration's policies on the international use of force from those of the former administration…. There was little doubt that when President [...]

Ten residents of New Haven, Connecticut, filed a lawsuit Wednesday against several US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, alleging violations of the Fourth, Fifth, and Tenth Amendments in planning and carrying out raids in 2007. The suit maintains that the raids, conducted only 36 hours after the city passed a measure that provided ID [...]

US President Barack Obama on Wednesday signed into law a defense appropriations bill that contains a measure extending the definition of federal hate crimes to include crimes motivated by gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. The president hailed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (NDAA) as a law containing long sought [...]

The Hawaii Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed the last claim seeking a permanent ban on the sale of lands ceded by the former monarchy. Claims were originally filed by four members of the Native Hawaiians and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) in order to prevent the sale of 1.2 million acres of land. Three [...]

The US House Financial Services Committee voted 49-14 Wednesday to approve new regulations governing investment rating agencies. The Accountability and Transparency in Rating Agencies Act , sponsored by Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) , modifies the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 , giving the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) the authority to monitor and punish ratings agencies. [...]

The Kuwaiti Constitutional Court ruled Wednesday that female lawmakers are not required to wear the hijab , or traditional Muslim headscarf. The ruling was in response to a petition brought by four voters seeking to invalidate the election of two of the four women who became the first female members of the Kuwaiti National Assembly [...]

Virginia Sloan : "The recent uproar surrounding Ohio's failed attempt to execute Romell Broom, who was convicted of murdering Tryna Middleton, highlights the continuing problems with lethal injection in Ohio, and elsewhere around the country. If the state is to continue using the death penalty, the state must comply with the "quick and painless" standard [...]

An Italian appeals court on Tuesday upheld the bribery conviction of David Mills , a British barrister and former lawyer to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi . Mills was sentenced in February to a four-and-a-half years in prison for allegedly accepting USD $600,000 in bribes for offering false testimony at two trials in 1997 and [...]

A judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit challenging the Obama administration's decision to ease restrictions on stem cell research . Nightlight Christian Adoptions claimed that the removal of restrictions on stem cell research would lower the number of embryos available for adoption. Judge Royce Lamberth [...]