The California Supreme Court upheld state sentencing guidelines on Monday, ruling that allowing judges to impose a discretionary range of sentences for various crimes did not give them too much power. The ruling follows the recent US Supreme Court holding in US v. Booker , which invalidated federal sentencing rules insofar as those had allowed [...]

The International Whaling Commission voted 29-23 against lifting its ban on commercial whaling Tuesday at its 2005 annual meeting . Japan had recently threatened to leave the organization if it didn't allow for some sort of sanctioned whaling. The ban has been in place since 1986. Only Norway continues to practice commercial whaling in spite [...]

Moroccan Abdelghani Mzoudi , acquitted by a Hamburg court in February on charges of helping the September 11 hijackers, flew home Tuesday to avoid deportation. Hamburg city officials had given Mzoudi two weeks to leave the country, or face arrest or deportation after the June 9 confirmation of the acquittal on appeal . Hamburg authorities [...]

Michael Schiavo buried the cremated remains of his late wife Terri Schiavo Monday at Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park in Clearwater, Florida. He had previously said he would bury her remains in his family plot in Pennsylvania . Schiavo's parents were not notified of the interment. Michael inscribed the words "I Kept my Promise" at the [...]

American Bankers Association, et al. v. Gould, et al., United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, June 20, 2005 . Excerpt: We therefore hold that the affiliate-sharing preemption clause preempts SB1 insofar as it attempts to regulate the communication between affiliates of "information," as that term is used in § 1681a(d)(1). That is, [...]

A panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that portion of a California law giving consumers the right to block banks from selling their personal information to other institutions is preempted by federal law. The court considered whether the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) trumps the California Financial Information Privacy [...]

The controversial confirmation of UN ambassador nominee John Bolton. stalled in the Senate again late Monday after Republicans failed, in a 54-38 vote, to gain the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture and commence a roll call. Earlier today, President Bush called on Senators to vote on Bolton’s nomination, and rebuked requests for more information [...]

Leading Monday's corporations and securities law news, General Electric Company has been subpoenaed by the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. In a press release issued Monday, GE said that the subpoena is part of an on-going government probe into the reinsurance and finite risk industry. AP has more. In other [...]

In a closed door meeting Monday, US District Judge Gladys Kessler urged the government and tobacco company executives to settle the multibillion dollar racketeering lawsuit filed by the Justice Department 5 years ago. In the suit, the government alleges that tobacco manufactures violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) by conspiring to downplay [...]

Leading Monday's states brief, the Supreme Court of New Jersey ordered its criminal practice committee to assess whether financial records should be given more protection as a matter of public policy. In upholding the conviction of a woman whose bank records were subpoenaed and shown to a jury, the Supreme Court found that privacy protections [...]