Free Republic

The U.S. Senate has confirmed Wilhelmina Wright as Minnesota’s newest federal judge. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken announced Wright’s confirmation Tuesday. President Barack Obama nominated Wright for a U.S. District Court opening in Minnesota last April. Klobuchar and Franken formed a bipartisan advisory committee to help them recommend a candidate. The Minnesota Democrats note that the Senate confirmed only 10 federal district court judges in 2015.

An elder-care charity run by nuns asked the Supreme Court on Monday to shield them from Obamacare’s birth control mandate, arguing that the government can provide their organizations’ female employees with contraceptives if it really wants to but shouldn’t force them to facilitate the coverage. Attorneys for the Little Sisters of the Poor and three Christian colleges say the administration already has exempted a series of employers, undercutting its push to force religiously affiliated groups to formally opt out of the regulations so that a third party can step in and pay for the drugs and services. “It is

WASHINGTON - The Louisiana Supreme Court Friday (May 1) permanently barred former Rep. William Jefferson from practicing law. Jefferson, 68, a Democrat who represented New Orleans in Congress for 12 terms, is serving a 13-year prison sentence in Oakdale for corruption and not scheduled for release until August, 30, 2023, when he would be 76 years old. The Louisiana Supreme Court said in its ruling that it agreed with the unanimous finding of the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board that the conduct of the Harvard-educated lawyer is so egregious that he should not be allowed to return to the practice of...

Lod District Court ordered the suspect, whose identity remains under a media gag order, to be released to a 10-day house arrest. After being held for 29 days - during the first 20 of which he was denied legal consultation - police asked to extend his arrest based on alleged involvement in an unrelated quarrel with Bedouin shepherds two years ago, in a request thrown out by the court. However, the Honenu legal aid organization representing the suspects reported the IPS was refusing the order to release him, as State Attorney Shai Nitzan had a request issued to have the...

After a landlord was convicted of pushing her Muslim tenant down a flight of stairs, a judge ordered her to respect the rights of all Muslims and to take an introductory course on Islam. Now the highest court in Massachusetts is being asked to decide whether the judge violated the landlord's constitutional rights. The Supreme Judicial Court will hear arguments next month in a case that poses interesting legal questions at a time when the country is grappling with anti-Muslim backlash following deadly attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, both allegedly carried out by radical Muslims. The case centers...

A judge in a British Sharia court told a married couple the wife must divorce the husband, have sex with a different man and wait three menstrual cycles before marrying the husband again in order to validate the marriage, it has been claimed.In her report on the growing number of Sharia courts in the UK, Dutch academic Machteld Zee, says judges are enforcing harsh rules on women who want to divorce abusive and neglectful husbands, and accuses them of allowing fundamentalists to enforce their ideology.Breitbart London wrote about her initial findings earlier this month, but now new detail has come...

Don't tell anybody what I want to do. If they find out you know that they'll never let me through Much to the surprise of a president who is used to doing whatever he wants, regardless of what the Constitution says about limits on his authority, the judiciary actually did its job yesterday by putting a stop to Obama’s executive order granting blanket amnesty to entire classes of illegal aliens. Obama now has only one option left, and that’s an appeal to the Supreme Court. Actually he does have another option, and it might be one he finds attractive -...

Full title: How to steal $75,000 from the poor in one Day's work - traffic court is a tax collection scheme masked as justice The new liberality concerning marijuana possession in the United States is long overdue, but let’s not exaggerate how much progress we’ve made. Users might not be ending up in jail as frequently as they did 10 years ago. But cops, judges, and courts still exercise arbitrary power to ruin people’s lives, and they continue to do so at astonishing rates, all over the country. I recently saw this firsthand. I sat in a municipal traffic court...

Imagine that your family or business suffers a loss due to some error or misdeed by a state agency. You go to the risk and expense of suing the agency, win the case, and the judge orders the state to pay not just the damages, but also the legal costs and fees you incurred. At that point you can, as the winning plaintiff collect a check and move on, right? Not quite, at least when it comes to collecting the “costs and fees” part of the judgment. Under current law, the state makes you jump through one more hoop: As...

A New York court recently ruled that a Long Island woman who killed her baby in a car accident cannot be convicted because her baby was not a person yet. The Times Union reports Jennifer Jorgensen previously was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter for causing the death of her baby daughter in a car crash. She also was indicted for driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol and endangering the welfare of a child, according to the report. Jorgensen was in her third trimester when the car accident occurred in May 2008. Her daughter was delivered by C-section after...

The U.S. Supreme Court appears on track to revisit the constitutionality of the death penalty, with recent remarks from justices and world leaders sparking fresh optimism from opponents of capital punishment. The high court under Chief Justice John Roberts has in recent terms agreed to rule on cases related to how states handle death penalty prosecutions and conduct executions, but has yet to weigh in on whether the practice violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.  Some court watchers say that will soon change, pointing to signals suggesting an appetite among some of the justices to...

Ramon Ochoa probably isn’t laughing now. Ochoa, who had previously served about six years for firearms possession by a felon, got into trouble with his probation officer, which resulted in Ochoa being back inside a Fresno courtroom. Ochoa’s mouth got him into more hot water when he laughed at O’Neill’s sentence, saying, “Anything else?” “Well, you just talked yourself into more time,” O’Neill replied. The judge doubled Ochoa’s sentence to two years for laughing at the court.

Short and sweet. If you have an hour and a half and want to watch something incredibly disturbing, go out on netflix or solarmovies.com and watch an excellently-done documentary, "Divorce Corp". We all see the articles posted here periodically about the atrocities and oxymorons of "family court". This shows just how bad things really are in family court in America, and both men (usually men) and women too, can be royally screwed by this system. Family court is a money racket for the judges, the lawyers, and the often-demanded to be hired "experts". Sobering enough to make you not want...

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The death of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Patrick Crooks with 10 months left on his term could set up a spring election that's as much a referendum on Gov. Scott Walker as it is on who should serve on the state's highest court. Walker is considering appointing Rebecca Bradley, a state appeals court judge he's twice named to lower court openings and who already had conservative support in her previously announced run for Supreme Court. Two other candidates for the court, who also announced their plans to run before Crooks died, have not applied to be...

US District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer ruled Wednesday against the Obama administration's motion to dismiss the case. Collyer said House Republicans do have the standing to pursue their challenge, which argues that the Obama administration violated the US Constitution by spending money on the law that had not been appropriated by Congress.

Relevant to the Kentucky county clerk being put into jail

It hasn’t been a good month for the EPA. A few weeks ago, EPA engineers accidentally breached a mine dam and polluted waterways in southwestern Colorado and northern New Mexico, after having bullied the landowner to access the mine. Ironically, their new rule that expands their authority by redefining the legal term “navigable waterways” was about to take effect tomorrow. A federal judge in North Dakota shut that down this afternoon, ruling that the EPA had exceeded its authority and jurisdiction from Congress: A federal judge in North Dakota on Thursday blocked a new Obama administration rule that would...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton turned himself in Monday morning at the Collin County Jail in McKinney to be booked on three felony charges. Paxton posted a total of $35,000 bond on two counts of securities fraud and one count of failing to register as an investment adviser. Sources said a grand jury in Collin County handed up the indictments Tuesday, which were immediately sealed. The charges stem from an investigation carried out by the Texas Rangers. The first two are first-degree felonies punishable by up to 99 years in prison on conviction. The last is a third-degree felony that...

Though a New York judge ruled Thursday that the law still considers chimpanzees property, not people, a prominent thinker in the pro-life movement warned that attempts to raise animals to human status will continue.  Wesley J. Smith, co-director of the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism, said Friday, "We are gratified that a court refused to declare two chimpanzees 'persons.' That is right and proper. Chimps are animals, and the 'species barrier' separating the value of humans and animals, as some animal rights advocates put it, must never be breached."   "But make no mistake," Smith said. "Attempts to...

A California court has ordered the pro-life Center for Medical Progress, the group behind a series of videos exposing Planned Parenthood for haggling over the price of aborted baby parts, to desist from released any new footage exposing the practice. According to a report by Fox News, officials from a company that purchases baby parts from Planned Parenthood were granted a restraining order against CMP, restricting them from releasing new undercover video. At this point, CMP has released three videos showing a series of conversations about how much money Planned Parenthood receives for certain parts of a baby's aborted body....