Serbia has met one of its key obligations towards the [ICTY] and simultaneously acknowledged the rule of law as a central building block for its future. While [Mladic's] arrest is an excellent result, the fact remains that he was at large for 16 years. This raises troubling questions about how it was possible for this individual to elude the substantial resources of a state system for so many years. We welcome the Serbian Government's statement that it will investigate and prosecute the networks that supported [Mladic] during his time in hiding. We also welcome the Government's expressed determination to expose and punish any state officials who assisted him. We ask the Serbian Government to follow through on these undertakings as a matter of priority.

Mladic made his first appearance in the ICTY [JURIST report] last week contesting the charges while simultaneously asking for more time to review them. Characterized by many media outlets as "defiant," Mladic saluted several times through the proceedings, referred to himself as "General Mladic" and smiled at some survivors of the massacre of Srebrenica [JURIST news archive] who had come to watch the proceedings. Serbian authorities captured Mladic [JURIST report] last month, ending a 16-year manhunt for the former general colonel and commander of the army of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mladic lost his final appeal in Serbia to avoid extradition, and was transported to The Hague [JURIST reports] last week. Mladic faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, including murder, political persecution, forcible transfer and deportations, cruel treatment and the taking of peacekeepers as hostages. He is most infamous for ordering the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the massacre of Srebrenica during the Bosnian civil war [JURIST news archive].

The Supreme Court ruled last month in Whiting that an Arizona employment law imposing penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants is not preempted by the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) [text]. The ruling opens the door for states to enact similar restraints on immigration. Several states have already enacted or proposed [JURIST reports] tough immigration laws. In March, the Oklahoma State Senate [official website] approved [JURIST report] a bill that would give police officers the authority to question the citizenship status of any person lawfully stopped for a traffic violation and arrest them without a warrant if the officer has probable cause to believe the person is in the country illegally. Also in March, Utah Governor Gary Herbert [official website] signed an immigration law requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone arrested for an alleged felony or serious misdemeanor, but a federal judge blocked [JURIST reports] it less than 24 hours after it took effect. In February, the Indiana Senate [official website] approved a bill [JURIST report] requiring suspected illegal immigrants to provide proof of their legal status and calls for all public meetings, websites and documents to be in English only.

April's elections were marred by violence. Just weeks after the election, International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo [official websites] announced an investigation [JURIST report] into recent violence following the national elections. The preliminary investigation, a precursor to a formal investigation, comes in the wake of riots that killed over 100 and displaced more than 40,000 [AP report]. Rioting broke out following the election victory [AFP report] of incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan [BBC profile; JURIST news archive], from the predominantly Christian south, over Muhammadu Buhari [BBC profile] from the predominantly Muslim north. Previous elections in Nigeria have been marred by violence and fraud [JURIST reports]. The recent elections are the first since the death of former president Umaru Yar'Adua [BBC obituary] in May, which resulted in Jonathan taking power [JURIST report]. In March, Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] and the Nigerian Bar Association [association website] called for the Nigerian National Assembly to pass legislation creating a special electoral offenses commission [JURIST report].

In February 2010, a federal judge ruled [JURIST report] that a lawsuit accusing Chiquita of assisting Marxist rebels who killed Colombian missionaries may go forward. The suit was brought [Palm Beach Post report] by family members of five North American missionaries who had worked for the New Tribes Mission (NTM) [mission website] in South America and were killed in separate incidents between 1995 and 1996. Chiquita admitted it had paid AUC for protection of its workers but it argued that it did not condone the killings. In 2007, Chiquita was fined $25 million [JURIST report] after admitting to making payments of around $1.7 million from 1997 to 2004 to AUC. Following that admission, hundreds of family members of Colombians killed by Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) [GlobalSecurity backgrounder] filed lawsuits in the US against Chiquita under the ATS. In January 2010, Chiquita settled [Bloomberg report] a shareholder lawsuit over the illegal payments.

Last month, the court ordered the trial to continue and that Anwar enter his defense. He was arrested in July 2008 after he filed a lawsuit against his accuser [JURIST reports] in late June. Last December, Anwar filed a complaint [JURIST report] in a Malaysian court over a WikiLeaks [website] cable published by Australian newspapers stating he had engaged in sodomy. The leaked US diplomatic cable claimed Australia's Office of National Assessments [official website] had concluded, in agreement with Singapore's Intelligence Agency, that the sodomy charges against Anwar were the result of a set-up, but that he was in fact guilty of committing the acts. Last year, the Federal Court of Malaysia [official website], the country's highest court, rejected Anwar's 2006 defamation suit against against former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad [BBC profile] for allegedly suggesting at a human rights conference that Anwar was unfit for office because of his supposed homosexuality. Anwar was Malaysia's Deputy Prime Minister under former Mahathir Mohamad until he was fired in 1998 following earlier sodomy charges of which he was initially convicted but later acquitted. He reentered Malaysian politics following the expiration of a ten-year ban [JURIST report] against him for unrelated corruption charges.

Stanford argued during oral arguments [JURIST report] that since Dr. Holodniy was an employee of Stanford and working on a project partially funded with federal money that he was precluded from being able to sign away his rights to the invention. accepted assertion that while the Bayh-Dole Act purported to put patents into the market, it did not change the long-standing rule "that title to an invention vests in the inventor, subject to assignment, not in the inventor's employer." However, counsel for Stanford further argued that the Bayh-Dole act should be read straight-forwardly, and not in relation to the general rule. Roche responded that, "Congress worked a highly transformative change in the law of patent ownership and assignment and did it in a very obscure and indirect way ... [creating] this brand-new vesting rule." The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit [official website] held [opinion, PDF] that Roche possesses an ownership interest in the patents at issue, depriving Stanford's standing to sue.

Whether common questions of law or fact predominate in a securities fraud action often turns on the element of reliance. The courts below determined that EPJ Fund had to prove the separate element of loss causation in order to establish that reliance was capable of resolution on a common, classwide basis." [...] We recognized in Basic, however, that limiting proof of reliance in such a way "would place an unnecessarily unrealistic evidentiary burden on the Rule 10b-5 plaintiff who has traded on an impersonal market."

To invoke the Basic court's rebuttable presumption of reliance based on the "fraud-on-the-market" theory, plaintiffs must demonstrate that the alleged misrepresentations were publicly known, that the stock traded in an efficient market, and that the relevant transaction took place "between the time the misrepresentations were made and the time the truth was revealed." Loss causation is not one of the elements that triggers the rebuttable presumption. The form of the rule adopted by the Court ultimately lessens the burden on plaintiffs seeking securities fraud class certification.

The plain text of ACCA requires a federal sentencing court to consult the maximum sentence applicable to a defendant's previous drug offense at the time of his conviction for that offense. The statute requires the court to determine whether a "previous conviction" was for a serious drug offense. The only way to answer this backward-looking question is to consult the law that applied at the time of that conviction.

Beginning October 1, 1994, North Carolina reduced the maximum sentence for selling cocaine from 10 years to 38 months and the maximum sentence for possessing cocaine with intent to sell to 30 months. Last week, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit [official website] rejected [opinion, PDF; JURIST report] a prisoner's attempt to have new crack cocaine sentencing guidelines applied retroactively to reduce his sentence. The three-judge panel found that it could not infer congressional intent to apply the Fair Sentencing Act [S 1789 materials] to prisoners already convicted and serving the prior mandatory minimum.

The court also granted certiorari in Kurns v. Railroad Friction Prods. Corp. [docket], which deals with the preemption of state court products liability claims relating to the death of an individual exposed to asbestos. George Corson worked for various railroad companies where much of his duties included removing insulation from locomotive boilers and putting brake shoes on locomotives. His estate brought claims against multiple defendants including a claim against Railroad Friction Products Corporation (RFCP) [corporate website] over brake pads they manufactured containing asbestos. The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit [official website] affirmed the district court's finding on summary judgment that claims were preempted [opinion, text] by the Locomotive Inspection Act [49 USC § 20701].

Our legal system generally requires each party to bear his own litigation expenses, including attorney's fees, regardless whether he wins or loses. Indeed, this principle is so firmly entrenched that it is known as the "American Rule." [...] That remains true when the plaintiff's suit also includes non-frivolous claims. The defendant, of course, is not entitled to any fees arising from these non-frivolous charges. But the presence of reasonable allegations in a suit does not immunize the plaintiff against paying for the fees that his frivolous claims imposed.

The Supreme Court ultimately adopted a "but for" test for determining precisely the fees for which a losing party is responsible. In other words, a prevailing defendant may receive fees that would not have been incurred "but for" having to defend against the additional federal claim or claims. During oral arguments [transcript, PDF] the justices discussed the merits of the "but for" test. The lower court had applied the "attributable exclusively" test, whereby prevailing defendants could receive those fees exclusively attributable to the frivolous federal claim. Counsel for the petitioner Fox argued that the lower court decision violated Congress' intention "to protect defendants from the lying or the vexatious plaintiff who shouldn't be in court at all." Counsel for the respondent Vice argued that the federal statute rightly allows for defendants to receive attorney's fees from plaintiffs, even if the plaintiff wins the case, if the plaintiff filed any frivolous claims.

Human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Doctors Without Borders (DWB) [advocacy websites] in April criticized [HRW press release; DWB press release; JURIST report] Bahrain for rampant human rights abuses related to anti-government protests. In March, six opposition leaders were arrested [JURIST report] in Bahrain after the government, backed by foreign troops from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) [official website], violently dispersed protesters in Manana. Days earlier, Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa [official website] declared [JURIST report] a three-month state of emergency [decree text, in Arabic] in response to growing unrest in the island nation. The state of emergency came just days after a group of 22 Bahraini lawmakers, part of an independent pro-government bloc, called on the King to impose martial law [JURIST report] under articles 36 and 123 of the Bahraini Constitution [text, PDF]. Also in March, the member states of the GCC, which includes Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the UAE, deployed troops to Bahrain [BBC report] for the purpose of guarding oil installations and financial institutions. The Bahraini government's response to the ongoing protests have prompted international concern. In February, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon [official profile] called for an end to violence against protesters [JURIST report] in the country, referencing attempts to quell protests sweeping across the region.