Superior Court of Washington, Thurston County; Judge Richard D. Hicks, September 7, 2004. Review the opinion . Excerpt: The clear intent of the Legislature to limit government approved contracts of marriage to opposite sex couples is in direct conflict with the constitutional intent to not allow a privilege to one class of the community that [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Mark Brown, holder of the Newton D. Baker/Baker and Hostetler Chair at Capital University School of Law, says today's Democrats should take note of the fact that in electoral contests as elsewhere, two wrongs don't make a right. Dirty tricks. That's what Democrats called Nixon's campaign tactics in 1972, when he unleashed [...]

England and Wales Court of Appeal, September 3 2004. Read the full document . Excerpt: In my judgment, the employment tribunal erred in law, as it failed to adopt the approach to disparate adverse impact laid down in Seymour-Smith. It should have taken the statistics for the entire workforce, to which the unfair dismissal and [...]

Utah Supreme Court, issued September 3, 2004. Read the opinion. Excerpt: …Utah's bigamy statute does not attempt to target only religiously motivated bigamy. Any individual who violates the statute, whether for religious or secular reasons, is subject to prosecution. See, e.g., Geer, 765 P.2d at 3. Thus, Utah's prohibition on bigamy is not a prohibition [...]

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, issued September 2, 2004. Read the full decision by the Deputy Registrar. Excerpt: CONSIDERING the Trial Chamber's oral Order of 2 September 2004, by which "ursuant to the Chamber's decision to assign counsel, the Registrar is instructed to appoint counsel for the accused" and "should endeavour in the [...]

Institute of Race Relations , issued September 2, 2004. From the press release: The Institute of Race Relations publishes today a catalogue that details how hundreds of Muslims have been arrested under terrorism powers before being released without charge; how the special powers granted by parliament to tackle terrorism are being deployed in other spheres, [...]

JURIST Contibuting Editor Ali Khan of Washburn University School of Law says that a recent USDOJ plan to encourage two Muslims to provide funds to assassinate Pakistan's UN Ambassador shows disrespect for international law and may also violate laws against entrapment. Call it creative law enforcement. Call it the murder they wrote. A few days [...]

JURIST Contributing Editor Marjorie Cohn of Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego says that perhaps the most far-reaching impact of the upcoming November election is who will get to appoint the nation's judges – including its Supreme Court justices – beginning January 2005. George W. Bush, while trying to convince skeptical conservative activists [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist LTC John M. Bickers, a law professor at the US Military Academy at West Point, says that two recent decisions regarding the death penalty show that the Supreme Court seems to accept capital sentencing as a punishment, as long as they can set the boundaries for sentencing. In a pair of cases [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist and constitutional law scholar Thomas E. Baker of Florida International University College of Law says that the US Supreme Court's 2000 ruling in Bush v. Gore is a precedent that could be repeated after the presidential election this fall. Going into the presidential election with an uneasy feeling of deja vu reveals [...]