On November 13, 2020, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked drilling on more than 300,000 acres in Wyoming for the second time in two years. In his decision, the judge took the Trump administration to task for failing to properly... Read More »
When the US Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) rejected former Columbian police officer Edier de Jesus Rodriguez Bedoya’s application for asylum, the ominous death threats kept coming. Bedoya and his family had arrived in the US legally in 2013 and applied for asylum. The now-retired Colombian law officer had spent... Read More »
Judge Miranda Du approved and revealed a settlement between Tesla and Martin Tripp on Monday, November 30, 2020. The settlement stipulates that Tripp will pay $400,000 to Tesla. He was accused of leaking information to reporters. He admitted the charges of stealing trade secrets. Tripp was a process technician at... Read More »
Late last Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court voted in a narrow decision of 5-4 blocking the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, from strictly limiting the number of people congregating in areas of worship, including churches and synagogues. The governor of New York implemented these restrictive measures after the state... Read More »
Wisconsin Attorney General Joshua Kaul and Governor Tony Evers are petitioning the state supreme court to assume original action in a case against the state legislature. The suit not only involves all three branches of government but pits two of them against each other. Kaul and Evers seek to have... Read More »
Several groups of nonprofit environmental advocacy groups have filed a lawsuit against California. The lawsuit is in opposition to a new dam that is set to be built in the Del Puerto Canyon. The lawsuit was filed by the Sierra Club, the California Native Plant Society, Friends of the River,... Read More »
On Wednesday, November 25, 2020, the Florida Supreme Court refused to reinstate death penalty sentences for two men whose death sentences were vacated pursuant to a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The men, Bessman Okafor and Michael James Jackson, had been convicted of murder and sentenced to be executed prior... Read More »
On October 19, 2020, Attorney General William Barr appointed Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham as special counsel under the same federal regulations that covered special counsel Robert Mueller in the original Russia probe undertaken in May 2017. The order authorizes Mr. Durham “to investigate whether any federal official, employee or any... Read More »
In a virtual hearing on November 20, The Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justices homed in on a specific area of interest concerning an appeal of Bill Cosby’s prior conviction: what is the permissible legal scope of using ‘prior bad acts’ witnesses? The use of ‘prior bad act’ refers to witnesses who... Read More »
Ivanka Trump was deposed Tuesday in the Washington, DC attorney general’s lawsuit late Tuesday concerning her father’s inauguration. President Trump’s daughter, who is also said to be under consideration by the president for a preemptive pardon, sat for her deposition in the offices of the attorney general. The lawsuit concerns... Read More »
On November 23, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned a 2017 district court decision that granted the right of individual plaintiffs to challenge a Texas state decision to disqualify Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program. The overruling decision now allows Texas and Louisiana to exclude... Read More »
The Department of Justice has quietly amended current execution protocols. The amended rule was published Friday, November, 27th and will go into effect on December 24. Different states currently allow different types of executions, and with the amendment, lethal injections will no longer have to be the primary method of... Read More »
A California DMV license plate standard that bans offensive license plates has been ruled unconstitutional and a violation of the First Amendment's freedom of speech by federal judge Sallie Kim. The current standard stipulates that the DMV must approve license plates with potentially offensive language before the plates can be... Read More »
The New York Task Force on Women in the Courts issued a report in 1968 that looked at the treatment and experiences of female attorneys, litigants, and other court employees in the state. The report yielded results showing that women were denied opportunities in professional capacities, equal treatment, and justice... Read More »
It may only be early December, but President Donald Trump is already meeting with advisors in the White House to discuss preemptive pardons for his adult children Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, along with son-in-law Jared Kushner and personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. Presidential pardons are extremely broad though not unlimited,... Read More »
