Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill announced Thursday that convicted Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi is being released from prison on compassionate grounds and transferred to his native Libya. Megrahi was recently diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, and his release comes days after the Scottish High Court of the Judiciary accepted [...]

A judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled Wednesday that several gay rights groups may not intervene in a lawsuit challenging California's constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage , Proposition 8 , on federal constitutional grounds. Judge Vaughn Walker denied requests to intervene filed by groups represented by the American [...]

Zainab Salbi : "Throughout Afghanistan's history, negotiations over women's status and rights in Afghan society have occurred largely in the context of political struggles to take power or to hold on to power. We can see from President Karzai's authorization and secretive implementation of the Shiite Personal Status Law – a measure that curtails rights [...]

A judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio ruled late Tuesday that the federal government cannot freeze the assets of an organization suspected of terrorism ties without probable cause. Judge James Carr also ruled that the government must tell the organization the basis for the asset freeze and give the [...]

Eight years after 9/11 , counterterrorism efforts continue to dominate the operations and budget of the FBI , according to a Tuesday report by the New York Times. Since the attacks, the bureau has doubled the number of agents it assigns to counterterrorism efforts and has created specialized "threat squads" to investigate possible threats. Agents [...]

Five Facebook users have filed suit in the Superior Court of California for Orange County alleging that the social networking site violated their privacy. Among the claims put forth in the suit filed Monday are that Facebook disseminates users' private information and copyrighted photographs, and altered its Terms of Use without seeking approval of users. [...]

JURIST Contributing Editor Michael Kelly of Creighton University School of Law says that the notion of setting up a special international tribunal to try Guantanamo detainees – most recently floated in an op-ed in the New York Times – is not as promising as it might at first appear… Mssr. Guénaël Mettraux, a respected defense [...]

The US government on Wednesday reached an agreement with Switzerland that would grant the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) access to information on thousands of Swiss bank accounts. As part of the agreement , the Swiss government will instruct banking giant UBS to begin to turn over information regarding certain anonymous bank accounts. In return, [...]

Oklahoma state court judge Vicki Robertson ruled Tuesday that a state law requiring women seeking an abortion to have an ultrasound within an hour of the procedure violates the Oklahoma Constitution . Without reaching the validity the of the ultrasound requirement itself, the judge held that the law violated a constitutional requirement that legislation only [...]

Bostan v. Obama, et al., US District Court for the District of Columbia, August 19, 2009 . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here. Latest commentary available here.