Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki on Tuesday announced plans to release 2,500 prisoners held in US detention facilities and Iraqi custody if the detainees "are not Saddam Hussein loyalists or terrorists or anyone who has Iraqi blood on their hands." Maliki's move comes in the name of "national reconciliation," while his government struggles with his [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Wendy J. Keefer, former senior counsel and chief of staff in the US Department of Justice Office of Legal Policy and now with Bancroft Associates in Washington DC, says that claims of a constitutional crisis arising out the recent FBI search of the Capitol Hill office of Rep. William J. Jefferson [...]

Motion filed by Jose Padilla to suppress physical evidence and issue writs and testificandum, United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, May 2006 . Read the full text of Padilla's motion , along with attached exhibits: a material witness warrant and sworn affidavit from FBI Special Agent Joe Ennis; the charging instrument [...]

Zedner v. United States, June 5, 2006 . Read the full text of the opinion per Justice Alito, along with a concurrence from Justice Scalia.

Anza v. Ideal Steel Corp., June 5, 2006 . Read the full text of the opinion by Justice Kennedy along with a concurrence from Justice Scalia, a partial dissent from Justice Thomas and a second partial dissent from Justice Breyer.

A ban on assault weapons in the city of Denver was affirmed by operation of law on Monday when the Colorado Supreme Court deadlocked in a 3-3 vote with one judge abstaining on whether to overturn the decisions in two lower court cases that had upheld the ban. The state enacted two laws in 2003 [...]

A lawyer for terror suspect Jose Padilla has filed a motion to suppress evidence he claims the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) obtained illegally from two sources, one which alleges torture after US rendition to Morocco and another who may have been heavily medicated during interrogation. According to the motion filed last week, Padilla requests [...]

Allegations that members of the US military killed civilians in Iraq should be investigated by the United Nations and an Iraqi-US committee, Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi said Monday. Al-Hashimi, a Sunni, described the allegations, along with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal , as part of a pattern of human rights violations by occupation forces. [...]

President Bush Monday denounced "activist judges" who have struck down state laws banning same-sex marriage as he urged Congress to approve the so-called Marriage Protection Amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. At a White House event, Bush said : Some argue that defining marriage should be left to the [...]

Serbian members of parliament declared Serbia a sovereign nation Monday, two days after the parliament of Montenegro proclaimed its own independence from the former Serbia-Montenegro union. The breakup marks the final dissolution of what remained of the post-WWII Federal Republic of Yugoslavia , now divided into six successor states (the others being Bosnia and Herzegovina, [...]