Gerald Austin McHugh, a judge for the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, ruled Tuesday that a proposed supervised injection site in Philadelphia does not violate federal law. Safehouse, a nonprofit organization that aims to reduce drug overdose deaths through prevention services, first announced their plans to institute the overdose prevention site [...]

On Tuesday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in United States v. Sineneng-Smith. The Court granted certiorari last October. Evelyn Sineneng-Smith challenged a law that criminalizes encouraging or aiding in illegal immigration. She was convicted of bringing persons to the US illegally through fraudulent use of the “Labor Certification” program which expired in 2001. The [...]

Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong-born bookseller who became a Swedish citizen in 1996, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Tuesday by China’s Ningbo Intermediate People’s Court for illegally providing information overseas. Minhai originally disappeared in 2015 while in Thailand. A statement by an EU spokesperson released Wednesday morning says, “ rights, including inter [...]

A federal bankruptcy judge denied Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) investors’ motion to apply Federal Rule of Bankruptcy Procedure 7023 to their class proofs of claim on Monday. In the motion, the investors argued that PG&E committed securities fraud by “mis investors about their wildfire safety practices.” They also claim that PG&E “artificially inflat stock [...]

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a new Public Health Update on the ongoing spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the US. The update warns of potential social consequences of the virus including school and daycare closures. The first significant number of cases of coronavirus were seen in Wuhan, China, the capital [...]

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court held that a child’s habitual residence depends on a totality of circumstances specific to the case, not on categorical requirements such as an actual agreement between parents. This decision follows the International Child Abduction Remedies Act implemented by  The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (Hague [...]

Lee Boyd Malvo, who was sentenced to multiple life-without-parole sentences for his involvement in the 2003 DC Sniper murders, asked the US Supreme Court to dismiss his appeal Monday following a newly-passed Virginia law allows parole boards to consider Malvo for early release. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signed the bill into law Monday. The bill [...]

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, whose 30-year rule ended when he was ousted from office during the conflict that came to be known as the Arab Spring in 2011, died Tuesday in Cairo at the age of 91. Mubarak served as the fourth president of Egypt from 1981 following the assassination of Anwar Sadat, to [...]

The US Supreme Court heard two oral arguments on Monday: US Forest Service v. Cowpasture River Preservation Association, in which the court will consider a case concerning a pipeline on federal forest land; and Opati v. Sudan, which asks whether the current version of the terrorism exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act allows punitive [...]

In a document released by the UN Human Rights Council on Monday, a Special Rapporteur analyzed the concept of “psychological torture” under human rights law. Ever since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the report says, the international community has done impressive work addressing its prohibition on torture. But “at the same time,” [...]