JURIST Guest Columnist Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond School of Law says the January opening of the 110th Congress offers an opportunity for a fresh and perhaps more bipartisan start to a stalled federal judicial confirmation process… When the 110th Congress convened, Congress was searching for ways to distinguish itself from the 109th, [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist William Teesdale, an attorney in the Federal Public Defenders Office in Portland, Oregon representing Guantanamo detainee Adel Hamad, a Sudanese national transferred to Guantanamo in early 2003 from Pakistan, says that on the fifth anniversary of the US terror detention camp we should remember that the detainees held there are individual [...]

The trial of six men charged with attempting to bomb a London subway and bus on July 21, 2005 began Thursday, with the jury being sworn in to try the six men on charges including conspiracy to murder, possession of explosives, attempted murder, and conspiracy to cause explosions. No one was injured during the July [...]

Cisco filed a lawsuit against Apple, Inc. on Wednesday in federal court, requesting injunctive relief from Apple's use of the name "iPhone," to which Cisco has held the trademark since 2000. Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's iPhone at a San Francisco tradeshow on Tuesday, despite not having agreed to the terms proposed by Cisco [...]

Lawmakers in the Italian Senate have started weighing proposals for legislation that would legalize civil unions in the country. The process in the Senate's Justice Committee comes a month after Senate leaders requested that a bill be drafted by January 31 that would give legal status to unions of all unmarried couples, both heterosexual and [...]

Democrats in the US Senate on Wednesday renewed efforts to pass legislation that would grant temporary legal status to illegal immigrant workers who work in agriculture, after House Republicans stalled bicameral negotiations last year. The Senate passed a bill in May that would set millions of illegal immigrants on a path to potential citizenship and [...]

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in the US District Court for the District of Columbia , seeking compliance with a CREW Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents related to the destruction of White House visitor record logs [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has announced it will rehear arguments on a preliminary injunction imposed last year which prevented South Dakota from enforcing a 2005 abortion law . Enforcement of the law was initially halted in 2005, pending a lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota and South [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in the consolidated cases Davenport v. Washington Education Association and Washington v. Washington Education Association , 05-1589 and 05-1657 , where the Court must decide whether a state campaign finance law that prohibits labor unions and their officials from seizing and using the wages of nonmembers for [...]

A federal appeals court heard oral arguments Wednesday on whether the government should be permitted to reinstate a charge against alleged terrorist Jose Padilla . The charge, conspiracy to "murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country," carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, unlike the other charges now against him. In August, [...]