In an 8-5-1 decision, the Florida First District Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the state's 1999 school voucher law violates the state constitution because it allows tax dollars to be spent on religious schools. The law states that a student in a public school who receives failing grades for two out of four years [...]

Jurors in the Scott Peterson trial have returned a verdict of guilty on the charges of first-degree murder for the death of his wife, Laci Peterson, and second-degree murder for his unborn child, Conner. Peterson stood trial on accusations that he killed his eight months pregnant wife on or about Christmas eve of 2002 and [...]

Peter Friedman, Case Western Reserve Law School: "Alberto Gonzalez, the nominee to be chief law enforcement officer of the land, prepared 57 confidential memos on the merits of granting death-row inmates clemency. 56 of the inmates were executed. As Philip Carter writes in Slate, the memos "would have barely earned a passing grade in law [...]

Software developer Novell announced Friday that it has filed a new antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in a Utah District Court. Read the Novell press release. Novell seeks an unspecified amount of damages for Microsoft's efforts to dominate the 1994-96 market for office data processing software such as Microsoft's Word and Novell's WordPerfect. It additionally claims [...]

Judge Alfred A. Delucchi has announced that the jury in the Scott Peterson murder trial in Redwood City, California, has reached a verdict which will be read out at 4 PM ET (1 PM local). Watch live coverage here via MSNBC. 2:50 PM ET – CBS5 in San Francisco has a story here.

A Milan prosecutor made her closing argument Friday in the corruption case against Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Prosecutor Ilda Boccassini summed up the evidence against Berlusconi, saying that there was more than enough to convict him of accepting bribes and bribing judicial officials. If convicted, Berlusconi faces up to 8 years incarceration. Boccassini presented [...]

A federal district judge Friday questioned a decision by US Attorney General John Ashcroft to seek the death penalty for convicted mob boss Joseph Massino. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York questioned the timing of Ashcroft's decision after he announced his resignation earlier this week, [...]

In Friday's environmental law news, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Thompson has announced that starting in January all tobacco will be banned on HHS property. The Department, which has about 66,000 employees, currently bans smoking inside its buildings. The new ban will extend the smoking ban to all outdoor property as well [...]

NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is expected to file suit Friday or Monday against health insurance consulting firm Universal Life Resources, stemming from a seven-month investigation into bid-rigging in the insurance industry. United Policy Holders, a consumer insurance group, has already filed suit against Universal, alleging that the company accepted payments from insurers to send [...]

The ACLU has sued MA police and port authority over a new security program at Boston's Logan International Airport, which the civil rights group claims leads to racial profiling. In the suit filed Wednesday, the ACLU argues that the "behavior pattern recognition" used by security at the airport "condones and encourages" racial profiling. State police [...]