Senator Arlen Specter , the chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee charged with vetting judicial nominees, including Supreme Court candidates, announced Wednesday that he has been diagnosed with a form of cancer known as Hodgkin's Disease and will undergo chemotherapy treatment. Specter, 75, missed Senate business earlier this week (including the vote approving the [...]

HR 310, Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005, passed by US House of Representatives, February 16, 2005 . Read the full text of the bill here. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it would appeal a US District Court opinion that would prevent pursuit of $280 billion in damages from tobacco companies for charges of civil racketeering. The 3-judge panel decided the damages would be “disgorgement” and not sufficiently forward-thinking to be allowed. The DOJ filed a brief outlining the [...]

The UN upheld its ban on its officials testifying in front of US Congress in a letter from Mark Malloch Brown, chief of staff for Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to Senate investigating subcommittee chair Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) that was released Wednesday. The letter is in response Coleman's congressional probe into the UN oil-for-food program. The [...]

Newly appointed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced Wednesday the reinstatement of a federal obscenity case against a California pornography company. Charges against the company were dismissed by US District Judge Gary Lancaster because prosecutors overstepped their bounds while trying to block the hard-core pornography from minors and unsuspecting adults. Gonzales said that while the Department [...]

The US Senate voted Wednesday to continue the declassification of files that may reveal CIA agents who were hired despite their prior affiliation with the German Nazi party. The CIA reversed its objections last month concerning the disclosure of what former Nazis and Nazi SS officers did for the agency and its predecessor the Office [...]

The Israeli Knesset Wednesday narrowly approved a measure to compensate Jewish settlers evacuating from the Gaza Strip. The bill passed 59-40, reflecting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's "unity" coalition and amid protests from Sharon’s own Likud party and nationalist interests. This is seen as a major step in Sharon's plan to eventually cede Gaza Strip territory [...]

Jim Maule, Villanova Law School: "…ost, if not all, of the discussion presupposes continuation of the social security system, with changes in the way revenues are gathered to fund it. A few proposals discuss changing benefits, either in amount or by delaying the age at which a retirement payout would begin. There has been almost [...]

Kenneth Anderson, Washington College of Law, American University: I want to go back to something that everyone has already talked to death – the UN report from a week or two back concluding that although Darfur involves mass murder, it does not meet the legal definition of genocide. The reason why the UN experts concluded [...]

Peter Friedman , Case Law School: "Robert Novak outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, and yet Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller have to go to jail because they won't disclose their sources for the information that Novak published? In his concurring opinion to the D.C. Circuit opinion affirming the trial court's order holding Cooper [...]