Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the high court’s newest addition, was given the honor of issuing the first ruling of the Supreme Court’s term yesterday. On its face, the case — about the right to appeal a judge’s order to disclose confidential attorney-client communications — doesn’t look very controversial, and More…
The Supreme Court is set to hear three big cases charging that the anti-corruption laws are too vague and recent high-level prosecutions under them must be struck down.
The law at issue, an amendment to the Wire and Mail Fraud Act of 1988, makes it illegal for More…
Last year, an Arizona housing developer known for building affordable homes for Hispanics filed a complaint against the City of Yuma, which denied his application to build homes for low to moderate income families in a predominately white high-income neighborhood. The developer sued for discrimination under the Fair Housing Act, More…
The Supreme Court today threw out a ruling of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that had ordered the government to disclose photographs of detainees being abused by U.S. officials. The ruling was widely expected, given that Congress had recently changed the Freedom of Information Act More…
I’ve been following the small but growing number of lawsuits brought on behalf of torture victims against U.S. government officials for more than a year now, but the opening statement in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Monday on behalf of four British former More…
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.
Depending on who you ask, the sentencing yesterday of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri to eight years in prison is either evidence that the civilian federal judicial system can successfully handle terror cases, or evidence that it’s a dismal failure.
Yesterday, Jonathan Hafetz, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer More…
Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog points out that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case of 17 Chinese Muslim Uighur detainees who a judge ordered released into the United States will likely also force the Justices to consider the constitutionality of two bills President Obama signed yesterday.
The More…
The Supreme Court just announced that it will hear the case of the Chinese Muslim Uighurs — detainees at Guantanamo Bay cleared for release but still in prison there — to decide whether a court can order the government to release detainees into the United States.
This will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who watched the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in which her answers were careful to reveal as little as possible about her views on anything, but it’s still rare for a new justice to admit that More…
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