Costa Rica's Supreme Court has upheld a law forbidding same-sex marriage , rejecting arguments that the law is unconstitutional. Hearing a lawsuit brought by lawyer Yashin Castrillo Fernandez, the court's Constitutional Chamber voted 5-2 to reject the argument that the same-sex marriage ban violates the principles of equality and autonomy expressed in Article 28 of [...]

A US magistrate judge ruled Tuesday that US Department of Justice employees must disclose whether they were aware of the government monitoring conversations between Sept. 11 detainees and their attorneys. The judge's ruling comes in a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of a class of Arab and Muslim men who [...]

Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic died of natural causes on March 11 when guards found him dead in his prison cell at the detention center for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia , and was not poisoned as some had speculated, according to the ICTY's final report released Wednesday. Security breaches resulting from [...]

Defense lawyers in the Saddam Hussein trial on Wednesday accused a prosecution witness of perjury and urged chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman to stop proceedings at the Iraqi High Criminal Court to investigate the credibility of all the prosecution witnesses. Defense lawyers showed a DVD in court depicting Ali al-Haidari, a witness for the prosecution, saying [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Nancy Rapoport, dean of the University of Houston Law Center, says that although the convictions of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling in the Enron corporate fraud trial offer several important lessons, it's not clear that all of them – or any, for that matter – will actually be learned…. By any measure, [...]

Garcetti v. Ceballos, Supreme Court of the United States, May 30, 2006 . Excerpt: Exposing governmental inefficiency and misconduct is a matter of considerable significance. As the Court noted in Connick, public employers should, "as a matter of good judgment," be "receptive to constructive criticism offered by their employees." 461 U. S., at 149. The [...]

A Jordanian court on Tuesday convicted the editors of two national newspapers and sentenced them to two months' imprisonment for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that incited protests and violence across the Muslim world earlier this year after first appearing last September in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The editors — Jihad al-Momani of Shihan and [...]

European Parliament v. Council of the European Union, European Court of Justice, May 30, 2006 . Read the full text of the ruling. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act, signed by President George W. Bush, May 29, 2006 . Read the full text of the Act . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Lawyers for the US Department of Justice argued in a federal court filing Tuesday that the government has no legal obligation to return documents seized by the FBI from the office of Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) , who is under investigation in connection with a bribery scheme involving a Kentucky telecommunications firm that was granted [...]