The US District Court for the Western District of Texas on Monday upheld a University of Texas at Austin (UT) affirmative action policy of considering race in student admissions. The plaintiffs were two Caucasian females who were denied admission to UT. They challenged the admission policy, which allows race and ethnicity to be considered among [...]

Kindhearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development, Inc. v. Geithner, US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, August 18, 2009 . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here. Latest commentary available here.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor takes a seat on the US Supreme Court – the first Hispanic and only the third woman to do so – the federal judiciary as a whole continues to be heavily dominated by white males, according to a new report released by the Brookings Institution . As of early August 2009, [...]

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acknowledged Monday that 11 deaths in immigration detention had gone unreported . ICE added 10 names to the official roster of immigration detainee fatalities and acknowledged an eleventh death that occurred last week. The revelation of the additional deaths came in response to an American Civil Liberties Union [...]

The specially-established Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission on Monday awarded damages "resulting from violations of international law" that occurred during the nations' 1998-2000 border war. The five-person panel established under the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague awarded USD $174,036,520 to Ethiopia and $161,455,000 to Eritrea , not including an additional $2,065,865 granted to individual Eritrean [...]

The US Department of State (DOS) on Monday announced that it has sent a report to Congress that gives a favorable opinion of Mexico's recent human rights record, paving the way for US aid to the country. The report outlines Mexico's progress in addressing a variety of human rights issues as part of the Merida [...]

Former Credit Suisse broker Eric Butler was convicted Monday of multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York . His co-defendant Julian Tzolov pleaded guilty last month and testified against Butler. Butler and Tzolov are accused of defrauding clients out of more than $400 million [...]

The Scottish High Court of the Judiciary on Tuesday accepted a request from convicted Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi to withdraw a pending appeal to his 2001 conviction. The court's decision to drop the appeal removes an impediment to Megrahi's petition to serve the remainder of his sentence in his [...]

A judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia issued a confidential ruling last week denying a habeas corpus petition by Guantanamo Bay detainee Adham Mohammed Ali Awad, the Miami Herald reported Monday. Yemeni native Ali Awad was detained following a skirmish and standoff outside a hospital in Afghanistan in 2002 and [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay the execution of death row inmate Jason Getsy. The Court also declined Getsy's petition for review. This was the first decision for newly sworn in Justice Sonia Sotomayor , who would have stayed the execution, along with Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruther Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen [...]