Law

The U.S. government has agreed to pay a total of $1.26 million dollars to five men who claim they were illegally detained and mistreated after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as part of a settlement agreement reached between the Justice Department and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Time has a shocking immigration story in its Aug. 27 issue about an undocumented woman originally from Oaxaca, Mexico, who was reported to the Department of Homeland Security for deportation when she showed up at a hospital in Pascagoula, Miss., to give birth. The agency took the  newborn away and arranged to have it placed [...]

Conservatives see victory in the stalled nomination of a normally uncontroversial post.

Likely lending a taste of the partisan, ideological ranting that’s sure to accompany the debate over President Obama’s pick of federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor to be the next Supreme Court justice, here’s a statement just issued by Wendy E. Long, former clerk to Clarence Thomas and counsel to the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network.
Judge [...]

Philip K. Howard is back. The lawyer who loves to hate other lawyers has returned, after a six-year hiatus since his last attorney-bashing book.
In a prominently featured op-ed Monday in the Wall Street Journal, Howard, who practices corporate defense law, cunningly found a way to use President Obama’s inaugural call for a “new era of [...]

As Daphne blogged earlier today, Dawn Johnsen of Indiana University Law School is going to helm the Justice Dept.’s Office of Legal Counsel, a crucial position for the balance between civil liberties and national security. (Under the Bush administration, it became the go-to office for rubber-stamping the legality of torture, indefinite detention and warrantless surveillance.) [...]

The case of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen arrested in New York and sent to Syria to be interrogated under torture, will be re-heard today by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, sitting en banc.
As I reported earlier, the 34-year-old computer consultant of Syrian descent was apprehended by U.S. authorities in 2002 [...]

The British government has initiated a criminal inquiry of the potential responsibility of CIA and British intelligence officials for detainee interrogation abuse, says Phillipe Sands in an interview with The American Lawyer posted today.
Sands, a professor of international law at University College London and author of “Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American [...]

After what appears to be the passage of Proposition 8 in California, gay marriage advocates have filed three different lawsuits challenging its legitimacy.
“The initiative process was improperly used in an attempt to undo the constitution’s core commitment to equality for everyone by eliminating a fundamental right from just one group — lesbian and gay [...]

U.S. District Judge Richard L. Williams rejected a lawsuit Monday afternoon that sought to extend polling hours in Virginia today. William ruled that election rules allowing those in line by 7 p.m. to vote after the polls close protects voters’ rights.
The judge also revealed that he had voted early on Friday and had to [...]