General Sir Michael Rose , a retired British military leader and the former UN military commander in Bosnia, has said that UK Prime Minister Tony Blair should be impeached for making the decision to go to war in Iraq based on flawed claims that the regime there possessed weapons of mass destruction. In a BBC [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Stephen Wermiel of American University Washington College of Law says that it is important to watch not only the posturing that began yesterday inside the hearing room for Judge Samuel Alito, but also to monitor the spin, polling and strategy that occurs outside… The political ritual that Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) has [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Wendy J. Keefer, former senior counsel and chief of staff in the US Department of Justice Office of Legal Policy and now with Bancroft Associates in Washington DC, says that on the second day of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel Alito senators spent too much time trying to [...]

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 [...]