John Bolton (official biography here), the US Under-Secretary of State who led the US campaign against the establishment of the International Criminal Court (see a representative speech by Bolton here) and later helped negotiate a series of controversial bilateral agreements with countries around the world that would exempt American personnel from its jurisdiction, is planning [...]

An alleged member of the Ku Klux Klan was arrested in Mississippi Thursday after being indicted by a grand jury for the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers that later inspired the movie "Mississippi Burning". The accused, Edgar Ray Killen is a now-80 year-old Baptist minister and one of eighteen individuals who stood trial [...]

The Washingston state governor's race went back to court Thursday as voters filed two challenges to the recount results which gave Democratic Christine Gregoire a victory over Republican Dino Rossi by a margin of 129 votes out of 2.9 million ballots cast (official recount results from the WA Secretary of State here). The state Republican [...]

The US Senate and House of Representatives Thursday rapidly approved a bill that would give a tax break to donors to tsunami relief efforts by allowing them to claim deductions in the 2004 tax year for donations made prior to January 31, 2005. The measure is designed to encourage fund-raising to help victims of the [...]

Jack Balkin, Yale Law School: "The hearings on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General of the United States have begun. Will no one in Congress say what should be obvious? That Gonzales has brought shame on our country by trying to devise legal strategies and arguments to circumvent laws against torture and [...]

Kenneth Anderson, Washington College of Law, American University: "I have caught just bits and pieces of the Gonzales confirmation hearings for Attorney General today. In general, he does not seem to have faced especially bitter attack – on the contrary, I thought the Democrats appeared to be pulling their punches, at least in the bits [...]

Two law deans, one a former Navy Judge Advocate General and the other a former senior State Department official in the Clinton administration, testified late Thursday at Senate confirmation hearings for US Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales that the permissive approach to torture and the concomitantly narrow approach to the Geneva Conventions adopted by the [...]

Transcript from the US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez to be US Attorney General, January 6, 2005. Read the transcript text from the Washington Post here.

Military lawyers for an Australian detainee held at Guantanamo Bay Cuba have said in court papers that their client, originally detained by the US in Pakistan in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, was later tranfered to US authorities in Egypt who subjected him to torture by beating, electric shock, and near-drowning. Mamdouh [...]

Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales faced almost six hours of Senate grilling Thursday during his portion of a day-long confirmation hearing that was by turns effusive, gruff, and scathing. Democratic Senators challenged the nominee on his handling of a wide range of legal issues as White House Counsel and counsel to then-Texas governor George W. [...]