JURIST Guest Columnist Nora Demleitner, former law clerk to Judge Samuel Alito and currently professor of law at Hofstra University School of Law, says that comments by senators on the first day of Judge Samuel Alito's Supreme Court confirmation hearings foreshadow a range of challenges the nominee will face in questioning on coming days… Yesterday’s [...]

An Act creating a study commission on the death penalty 1and imposing a moratorium on executions, passed by the New Jersey Legislature January 9, 2006 . Read the draft text of the bill. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The New Jersey Legislature passed a bill Monday to suspend executions and create a New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission to examine all aspects of the death penalty , including its fairness and costs. The 13-member commission will report back to the legislature in November on whether the death penalty is consistent with evolving standards [...]

US Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito used his 11-minute opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee late Monday afternoon to describe his family background, his education, and his professional career, and to highlight key points of his judicial philosophy. He spoke after 18 senators made their own opening statements on the first day of [...]

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer Monday called on Serbia and Bosnia to step up their efforts to find wanted war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic , both indicted for genocide and other war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. After more than 10 years as fugitives, de Hoop Scheffer expressed his hope [...]

The Swiss Supreme Court Monday denied a Russian request for the transfer of bank documents to Russia relevant to an ongoing investigation into crippled Russian oil giant Yukos . The Swiss court held that Russia provided insufficient evidence of wrongdoing to warrant the transfer. The Swiss court has already frozen at least $48 million of [...]

Two Muslim men accused of supporting terror will stand trial after a federal judge in New York state ruled Monday that there was enough evidence to pursue the case despite defendants' arguments that they had been entrapped by FBI agents. US District Judge Thomas McAvoy ruled that the entrapment evidence did not sufficiently outweigh the [...]

Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was granted bail on Monday after seven weeks of house arrest on the three remaining charges against him relating to the disappearance and presumed death of dissidents during his 17-year rule. Pinochet was granted bail last week on the six other human rights charges that have so far been leveled [...]

The US Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in Hudson v. Michigan where it will decide whether police officers were justified in entering a plaintiff's home without knocking when they arrived with a warrant to search for drugs. Justices could use this case to make it easier for officers to execute search warrants. They could also [...]

Swiss intelligence agents have been aware of secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe for nearly two months, according to documents leaked to the Swiss newspaper SonntagsBlick . According to SonntagsBlick, Swiss military intelligence agents used satellite listening systems to intercept a fax sent from Cairo to the Egyptian embassy in London, the contents of which [...]