A judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted a motion for summary judgment on Tuesday vacating a time-in-service requirement for non-citizens who qualify for US citizenship based on their service in the US military. On October 13, 2017, the US Department of Defense (DOD) adopted a policy requiring non-citizen service [...]

A US federal judge Thursday ordered Michael Cohen, the longtime personal attorney for Donald Trump, to be released back to home confinement after finding that Cohen was being detained in retaliation for writing a book about the President. The order comes just days after his attorney and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a petition [...]

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia filed a complaint in federal court on Monday seeking declaratory and injunctive relief against a new federal rule aimed at international students. The new rule, announced by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) on July 6, 2020, requires students on F-1 and M-1 visas to enroll in a sufficient [...]

A judge in Dutchess County, New York, issued a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order on Tuesday to stop Simon & Schuster from releasing any details of a book by President Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump: “Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” Donald Trump’s brother Robert Trump [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up an appeal by the Center for Biological Diversity, Animal Defense Legal Defense Fund and others challenging the constitutionality of the Department of Homeland Security’s waiver of federal, state and local laws in construction of a southern border wall. The Center for Biological Diversity challenged six [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed on Wednesday that dinosaur fossils belong to a ranch’s surface estate and were not included in the mineral rights to the land. In Murray v. BEJ Minerals, BEJ Minerals sold the surface rights of a Montana ranch to the Murrays while retaining the mineral rights. [...]

The US Supreme Court issued an unsigned opinion Monday finding that the petitioner was prejudiced at trial by constitutionally deficient counsel. The case, Andrus v. Texas, involved an attempted carjacking, which resulted in two deaths, and for which the petitioner, Terence Andrus, eventually received the death penalty. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found that, [...]

Amnesty International launched a new resource Thursday based on the evidence collected by Crisis Evidence Lab on the misuse of tear gas by police and security forces around the world. The site includes explainers on how tear gas works, interviews with medical and human rights experts, how it is abused, and an incident map. Tear [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Wednesday remanded a case brought by the Libertarian Party of Georgia challenging the state’s ballot-access law to the lower court for failing to address the constitutionality of the law. A judge for the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia had granted a [...]

President Trump declared a national emergency today in a press conference at the White House Rose Garden. Trump did not cite the provision he would use to declare the emergency but did state that under the Stafford Act he had “very strong emergency powers…and if I need to do something, I’ll do it.” If the [...]