California Attorney General Jerry Brown  said  Wednesday that portions of Proposition 209 , an amendment to the California Constitution  banning the use of affirmative action for state hiring, contracting, or university admission, may violate the US Constitution. Brown made the statement in a letter to the Supreme Court of California regarding the case of Coral Construction v. City and [...]

Kyu Ho Youm : "A Korean judge's acquittal of the blogger Park Dae-sung (aka "Minerva") in Seoul is a welcome development in freedom of speech and the press in Korea, one of the most-wired nations in the world. There should have been no charges against Park. Few doubt that the government's claim that he has [...]

The Connecticut General Assembly on Wednesday approved a bill granting same-sex couples the right to marry. The legislation codified the October ruling by the Connecticut Supreme Court , which held that the Connecticut Constitution requires that same-sex couples be allowed to marry. The Connecticut Senate voted 28-7 to approve the bill, while the state's House [...]

A judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia ordered Wednesday that Afghan Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohammed Jawad , detained since he was a teenager, be allowed to challenge his detention in federal courts without delay. The judge denied the Justice Department's motion to dismiss or delay a challenge to Jawad's case [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought against Iran by hostages from the 1979 hostage situation in Tehran. The class-action lawsuit, brought by from former hostages Charles Scot, David Roeder, Don Sharer, and the family of Barry Rosen, seeks $6.6 billion in damages. The DOJ argued in [...]

The Constitutional Court of Moldova on Wednesday validated the recount results of the April 5 election in which the Communist Party won 60 of the 101 parliamentary seats. The court issued two acts , which cannot be appealed and are official as of the day adopted, confirming the results and validating the terms of the [...]

Awzar Thi : "At a meeting of lawyers and jurists in Hong Kong this week a participant from Thailand identified the key issue for her country's legal system as political control of the judiciary. Her statement was remarkable not because it revealed something that other participants didn't already know, but because just a few years [...]

The spokesman for China's Supreme People's Court , Sun Jungong, announced Wednesday that he had started writing his own blog in order to directly communicate with the public. Sun said he will operate the blog in a semi-official capacity and that he would honestly answer questions posed there in an effort to make the judiciary [...]

A Sudanese court on Wednesday sentenced 11 members of the Darfur rebel group the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) to death by hanging for their involvement in a 2008 attack on Khartoum . Out of seven other defendants tried in the proceedings, five were acquitted and two had their cases transferred to a different court [...]

 The US Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in Ricci v. DeStefano , where the Court will consider whether a government employer may refuse to certify results of a civil service exam that would make disproportionately more white applicants than minority applicants eligible for promotion, because of fears of charges of racial discrimination. Petitioners [...]