CIA Director Michael Hayden on Wednesday spoke against requiring the US government to show probable cause to obtain warrants to wiretap domestic conversations thought to involve al-Qaeda affiliates during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on adapting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to the threat of terrorism. Hayden argued that while FISA was appropriate for [...]

Missouri's revised plan for conducting executions by lethal injection fails to ensure that executions do not cause unconstitutional pain and suffering, according to US District Judge Fernando Gaitan , who halted all executions in the state in June . Gaitan wrote on Tuesday that the proposal was an improvement over existing procedures but still did [...]

The Washington Supreme Court ruled Wednesday morning that a statute prohibiting same-sex marriage does not violate the state Constitution. The Supreme Court reversed a 2004 Superior Court ruling that the state's 1998 Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional because it was "not rationally related to any legitimate or compelling state interest and is certainly not [...]

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled 7-0 Wednesday that a Cincinnati suburb may not use eminent domain to take private property on the sole basis of economic benefit to the community. Several residents of Norwood held out on selling their homes to make way for a $125 million commercial development, and after a consulting firm found [...]

Israel has denied using banned cluster munitions in Lebanon. On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of using the cluster grenades in an attack on a Hezbollah village in South Lebanon last week. Israeli Ambassador to Moscow Arkady Milman called told Russian media that "reports of the Israeli army using cluster munitions is an obvious [...]

UK Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer issued a review of the implementation of the Human Rights Act Tuesday indicating that the government will not support legislation to amend or appeal the Act but wants instead to dispel "myths" surrounding it so that public officials governed by the Act do not overbalance the rights of criminals against [...]

Saddam Hussein attended trial proceedings Wednesday for the first time since the prosecution called for the death penalty during closing arguments in June. In a statement to Presiding Judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman , Hussein asked to be executed by firing squad rather than hanging and complained that he had come to trial proceedings against his will. [...]

The UK Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday that Military Families Against the War (MFAW) , a group of families with members who have died in Iraq, is entitled to apply for judicial review of the government's decision not to hold an independent inquiry into why the UK went to war. Reversing a High Court decision [...]

The Bush administration has begun circulating a draft bill to authorize military trials for terror detainees at Guantanamo Bay , according to a report in Wednesday's New York Times. The draft bill, written by acting Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury , would allow the use of reliable hearsay evidence and would permit the court to [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Elizabeth Price Foley of Florida International University College of Law says that President Bush's veto of stem cell research legislation is an abuse of his constitutional authority antithetical to the rulings of the US Supreme Court… For the first time in his presidency, President Bush last week exercised raw power to veto [...]