British Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer Wednesday proposed a plan to cut the length of criminal trials and reduce the costs of legal aid , which have risen by a third since the Labor Party took power in 1997. Under Falconer's proposal, lawyers will have to bid for contracts to take legal aid cases and then [...]

Riots erupted across Afghanistan Wednesday in response to a recent report by Newsweek magazine that in an effort to infuriate Muslim prisoners US troops at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Koran by placing copies on toilets and in one case had even flushed a copy down a latrine. Insulting the Koran is blasphemy to Muslime [...]

A federal judge Tuesday threatened to take over the California prison health care system , citing "terrible" medical care that prisoners receive. Judge Thelton E. Henderson cited complaints about bad doctors, wretched facilities, and irresponsible management of HIV patients, all of which are said to have led to inmate deaths. The prison system has acknowledged [...]

A US bankruptcy judge ruled Tuesday that United Airlines may sever its employees' pension plans, precipitating the largest corporate-pension default in US history. The ruling by Judge Eugene Wedoff means that United employees will now receive their pensions through Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) which initially opposed the plan, but later agreed to receive $1.5B [...]

New York-based monitoring group Human Rights Watch issued a report Wednesday criticizing the US and other governments in the West and Middle East for sending Islamist detainees to Egypt, a country infamous for torture . The report, entitled Black Hole: The Fate of Islamists Rendered to Egypt , tracked 61 individuals turned over to Egyptian [...]

Egypt's lower house of Parliament overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the Egyptian Constitution Tuesday setting regulations for multi-candidate presidential elections . The upper house had passed the regulations Sunday, which require candidates to be a member of a political party or receive a minimum of 65 recommendations from elected members of the lower house, 25 [...]

The Real ID Act passed the US Senate 100-0 late Tuesday as a rider on an $82B emergency supplemental appropriations bill funding military operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. The controversial act , intended to discourage illegal immigration and increase domestic security, sets federal identification standards for obtaining state driver's licenses and multiplies the [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Dr. Laurent Pech, Jean Monnet Lecturer in European Union Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway, says that the proposed European Constitution may be less than it's cracked up to be, and that its possible rejection by French voters in the referendum slated for late May could actually lead to a [...]

Re: Cheney, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, May 10, 2005 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Tuesday that he hoped the Senate could take up the contentious issue of judicial nominations by next week. During a meeting with the press, Frist said the Senate could finish debate on a highway bill and on emergency funding for US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan by next week. [...]