Raising serious questions about the constitutionality of a key part of President Obama”s new health care reform plan, and finding no Supreme Court decisions specifically on the issue, a federal judge on Monday ruled that the state of Virginia’s court challenge to the plan  may go forward.  U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson of Richmond, VA, rejected ...

The D.C. Circuit Court’s deeply-set refusal to let  federal judges oversee government decisions on which detainees may or may not leave Guantanamo Bay has now reached the longest-running effort to keep a detainee from being sent to another country over his protest.   In a one-page order released late Thursday, the Circuit Court dismissed outright the case ...

UPDATE Friday p.m.  A federal judge on July 22 ordered Jason Pepper’s release from prison while the Supreme Court considers his appeal.  (Thanks to Doug Berman of Sentencing Law and Policy blog for the alert and the link to the release order.) ——————– The Supreme Court on Thursday named a New York City lawyer and ...

Former Canadian and U.S. media magnate Conrad M. Go here to read the rest: Conrad Black wins release

Reacting to a Supreme Court order to take a new look at “indecency” on radio and TV, the Second Circuit Court suggested on Tuesday that constitutional law on free speech may need to be updated for the Digital Age, especially now that  “new offensive and indecent words are invented every day.”  Even so, applying First Amendment doctrine ...

Analysis The Supreme Court finished a Term this week without deciding another case on detainees’ rights, but there very likely is another Guantanamo Bay case in its future — perhaps its near future.  A test of wills is unfolding (though, so far, mostly in secret documents) between a no-nonsense trial court judge and an appeals court ...

Analysis Dismantling a legal edifice built up by lower courts over nearly a half-century, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that America’s main law against securities fraud does not apply to investment deals that occur outside of this country, even if they have some domestic impact or effect.  For the first time, the Court declared ...

The Supreme Court, taking on a case affecting the rights of credit card customers, agreed on Monday to settle banks’ duty to give advance notice before raising the interest rate they will charge when a card user defaults on a payment.   The Court granted review despite the advice of the federal government that the case ...

The Supreme Court, having already shown it was interested in the controversy, on Monday finally agreed to rule on at least part of the state of California’s complaint about being forced by a federal court to release close to 40,000 inmates from its 33 state prisons, to relieve over-crowding and a serious health crisis.  The ...

The Supreme Court has put off, until after getting some advice from a state court, a significant test case on the constitutionality of requiring a juvenile to register as a sex offender, if the youth’s crime occurred before the federal law was passed in 2006.  That question was before the Court in U.S. Continued here: Sex ...