Lawyers for suspected "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla have asked a South Carolina federal judge to hear their claim for a writ of habeas corpus or release Padilla, currently being held in the US Naval Weapons Station brig in Charleston. A brief filed Wednesday said that the claims made against Padilla, who has been held for [...]

AP is reporting that the Ukrainian Supreme Court has rejected losing presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych's appeal of last month's presidential revote. 12:45 PM ET – BBC News now has a full story here.

Anthony D'Amato, Northwestern University Law School: "Although the N.Y. Times and Washington Post have been admirably accurate in reporting the standard legal issues, they have overlooked the single most telling point in the debate about Gonzales, perhaps because of its subtlety. We start by observing that whenever the Department of Justice gives any legal advice [...]

Continuing his campaign for tort reform, President Bush meets with lawmakers Thursday to discuss shifting many class-action suits from state to federal courts a day after delivering a speech in Illinois on capping damage awards for medical malpractice. The administration and its Congressional supporters emphasize the costs of so called "junk lawsuits" to business and [...]

AP is reporting that a federal bankruptcy judge in Alexandria, Virginia, has canceled a collective bargaining agreement between US Airways and its machinists union (part of the International Association of Machinists), providing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings to the struggling air carrier, but forcing pay cuts for union workers ranging from 6 [...]

Kenneth Anderson, Washington College of Law American University: "One thing that is missing in the whole torture-interrogation debate is the question of who you are interrogating. Can you use a different level of interrogation on Zarqawi, for example – knowing it is Zarqawi – than you could on someone who might indeed turn out to [...]

Israel's Supreme Court ruled Thursday that thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody would not be eligible to vote in Paletinian elections scheduled for January 9. Chief Justice Aharon Barak said that Israel would not have time at this stage to prepare for including the prisoners in existing voting procedures. The ruling is not yet [...]

White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, President Bush's nominee for Attorney General, explicitly told the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning that "torture and abuse would not be tolerated" under his leadership of the Justice Department, that the Geneva Conventions would be honored "wherever they apply", and that the US generally would abide by all (orally emphasizing [...]

AP is reporting that Democrats will force debate in both the House and Senate on the Ohio election returns before formally certifying President Bush's re-election today. This is only the second time since 1877 that pre-certification debates have been forced. The debates, which will disrupt what would have been a routine joint session of Congress [...]

The Texas 1st Court of Appeals has overturned Andrea Yates' capital murder convictions in the drownings of her children, ruling that false testimony by a state expert witness could have affected the judgment of the jury. Read the full text of the opinion here. The Houston Chronicle has more.