The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers , will probably head the new UK Supreme Court when it opens in 2009, the Times reported Monday. The new top court, created by the Constitutional Reform Act of 2005 , will technically replace the judicial panel of the House of Lords [...]

Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the clandestine branch of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who ordered the destruction of videotapes showing the interrogation of terror suspects , will not appear at a closed congressional hearing later this week, his lawyer said Monday, indicating he had been excused because he would refuse to answer [...]

Investigating judges of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) met with former low-level Khmer Rouge members Tuesday in an effort to secure their cooperation with the court's mission. ECCC judges assured the former Khmer Rouge cadres that the court's mandate only permits prosecutions against high-level Khmer Rouge figures; many former members have [...]

Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) members said Monday that Pakistan's lawyers will relax their ongoing boycott of the post-emergency judiciary to Thursday of every week and one hour of every day, because the backlog caused by their 12-week boycott was creating hardship for civil litigants and criminal defendants. The PBC said it continued to support ousted [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in the case of Virginia v. Moore , 06-1082, where the Court is being asked to decide whether the Fourth Amendment requires the suppression of evidence obtained incident to an arrest that is based upon probable cause, even though the arrest violated state law. The case arose [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist A. John Radsan, former CIA assistant general counsel now at William Mitchell College of Law, reminds us of other recent investigations into CIA activities apart from the destruction of interrogation tapes and explains why we should pay as much attention to the former General Counsel, Scott Muller, as to the Acting General [...]

Pandemic Preparedness: The Need for a Public Health – Not a Law Enforcement/National Security – Approach, American Civil Liberties Union, January 14, 2008 . Read the full text of the report . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Cristián Correa : "The whole debate about if waterboarding is torture or not seems artificial to me, because it is very clear that drowning detainees during interrogation is a way of intentionally inflicting severe physical suffering for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession. McConnell's comments are just what should be expected from any [...]

Malcolm Nance : "That the National Director of Intelligence, Mike McConnell would recently come out and opine that waterboarding "hether it's torture by anybody else's definition … for me it would be torture" tells me that the heretofore positive view of torture may be ready to dramatically reverse itself. First, an aside. Admiral McConnell is [...]

A French court Monday froze bank accounts belonging to several Russian state organizations including the Central Bank of Russia, the Russian Finance Ministry , the presidential administration's foreign property arm, the Russian Energy Ministry , state arms monopoly Rosoboronexport, and the government news service RIA Novosti . The accounts were held by a French division [...]