Free Republic

For six months, the rules for how Americans can vote during the coronavirus pandemic have been locked in court battles while states across the country rushed to embrace mail ballots. Now, with just weeks to go before the Nov. 3 election, voting rights advocates and Democrats have advanced on key fronts in the legal war, scoring victories that make mail voting easier, ensure votes cast by mail are counted and protect the wide distribution of mail ballots in some states.

<p>Last week, a Wisconsin judge declared that instead of having to be present on Election Day to be counted, absentee ballots postmarked by 8 p.m. Election Day could be counted so long as they arrived up to six days later.</p>

“Nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program,” President Reagan once said. That adage certainly applies to the Temporary Protected Status program. TPS was intended to give only short-term permission for aliens to be in the U.S., but that permission has often gone on seemingly without end. Fortunately, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-to-1 decision, has just dissolved an injunction that prevented the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from ending TPS for illegal aliens from Sudan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Haiti who have been in the U.S. for decades. As Judge Consuelo Callahan...

Amy Coney Barrett, a front-runner for the open U.S. Supreme Court seat President Donald Trump is pushing to fill, is a favorite among religious conservatives. As a judge on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett, 48, has voted in favor of one of Trump's hardline immigration policies and shown support for expansive gun rights. Here are some of her most notable opinions. GUNS Barrett indicated support for gun rights in a March 2019 dissenting opinion. She was part of a three-judge panel that considered a challenge to a federal law that bars people convicted of felonies from...

Trump Appoints Supreme Court Justices and Federal Judges

The next president will likely solidify a lasting majority on the courts of appeals, either cementing President Trump’s judicial legacy or largely undoing it. Our nation’s courts are nearing a tipping point. During President Trump’s first term, he has achieved a slim conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court (5 of 9) and has evened the score in the critically important federal courts of appeals, which are the final stop for more than 99 percent of all federal appeals.Now, data compiled by the Article III Project (A3P) shows that the next president will likely solidify a lasting majority on the...

Near-total control of the federal appeals courts is within reach for legal conservatives if President Donald Trump is reelected, administration allies believe. While the pace of Trump's judicial appointments has been steady, about two-thirds of his circuit court nominees have replaced Republican-appointed judges, University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias told the Washington Free Beacon. A second Trump term would offer Republicans a chance to replace many judges nominated by Democrats as well, elevating Trump's judicial record from productive to transformational. The prospect of further appointments to the Supreme Court is also realistic, a chilling notion for Democrats that prompted...

multipage order at link

Dubai’s highest court has rejected an appeal by the ex-wife of a Russian billionaire to seize a £350 million ($460 million)superyacht in one of the world’s costliest divorce battles, a court ruling last week said. The Dubai Court of Cassation rejected an appeal by Tatiana Akhmedova, ex-wife of oil and gas billionaire Farkhad Akhmedov, to seize the yacht as part of a 453 million pound divorce bill imposed by London’s High Court. The vessel, the M.V. Luna, was built for Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich before Akhmedov bought it in 2014. It has at least nine decks, space for 50 crew,...

Dear Judge Sullivan, Well, that just tears it, doesn't it? You were the god (small "G") of your courtroom. All powerful, take no guff. Throughout the process you were hard on both sides. Cheers alternated from the left and the right. I'll bet you figured when everyone was mad at you, you must be charting the right course. You were all set to mete out historic punishment, cementing your position in history and the A-list of party invites.

Pundits often speak of the judiciary in terms of liberal or conservative judges issuing liberal or conservative opinions. The reality is far more complicated—and interesting. As the growing divide among "conservative" judges in criminal justice cases makes clear, such labels frequently obscure more than they reveal.

The authenticity of the recording of the phone conversations between the former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden and the 5th president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko can be established by the court. The Chairman of the Political Council of the Opposition Platform - For Life Party, MP Viktor Medvedchuk stated this on air of Pulse talk show on 112 Ukraine TV Channel. “The actions, of which we found out from the leaked recordings of Mr. Biden and Mr. Poroshenko’s conversations, these actions have signs of a number of serious criminal offenses. I can talk about this as a lawyer. This is...

On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump did what he does worst -- he took to Twitter to type two tweets that threatened to withhold federal funds from Michigan and Nevada because he doesn't like what state officials are doing to facilitate mail-in voting. Where to begin? For one thing, it's odd to watch a president claim that states can't manage their elections after he just spent the past two months telling America that only governors have the authority to mandate social distancing policies during a pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 94,000 Americans. On the coronavirus response,...

Point by point, the judge in downstate Clay County on Friday ticked off the many ways he found Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s stay-at-home order had devolved into “insanity” and become “completely devoid of anything approaching common sense.” Clay County Judge Michael McHaney complained that recently legalized pot shops had been deemed essential over generations-old family businesses. People had been led to believe they could avoid COVID-19 at Walmart but not at church. And to top it off, McHaney complained that Pritzker’s family members had traveled between Illinois and Florida and Wisconsin during the coronavirus pandemic, contrary to Pritzker’s own stay-at-home order....

The Department of Justice should weigh in and soon because this case is no longer just about Flynn. It is about separation of powers, the executive branch — and now, unfortunately, about Judge Sullivan. Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and his legal team, led by attorney Sidney Powell, received promising news Thursday from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In a rare move, a three-judge panel ordered Judge Emmet Sullivan, the presiding judge in the long-running criminal case against Flynn, to respond to Powell’s petition for a writ of mandamus. In that petition, Powell asked the appellate court to order...

Clay County Circuit Judge Michael McHaney ruled yesterday that Bailey, of Xenia, could ignore the governor’s order. While the judge’s decision only applies to Bailey, it opens the door for other opponents to do the same. During the nationally televised interview, Pritzker accused Bailey of political showboating: “This state representative was looking to gain some celebrity for himself. He took it to a local court, to a local elected judge and got the ruling that I think he knew he was going to get in that local courtroom.” The governor also painted Bailey’s backers in the courtroom — he was...

On Monday, an Illinois county judge granted a temporary restraining order against Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker's 30-day extension of his statewide stay-at-home order. The judge's decision said that Pritzker's extension effectively "shredded the Constitution," overstepping his power as governor. Darren Bailey, the plaintiff who had requested the court to issue the restraining order... argued that while state law allows the governor to declare a disaster for 30 days, the law doesn't explicitly say whether a governor can extend such a declaration or issue a concurrent one when the original is set to expire. While Pritzker asserts that precedent allows for...

Downstate Jasper County has seen only three residents die of COVID-19, and Monroe County only ten. But the two southern Illinois counties have the highest per capita death rates from coronavirus of all the state’s 102 counties, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Monday. “That means you’re more likely to die of COVID-19 if you live in either of those two counties than if you live in Chicago or in Cook County,” the governor said. Rural Jasper County, in southern Illinois, with a population of 9,611, has 42 reported cases and three deaths from the coronavirus, according to Illinois Public Health Department...

It’s a decision the governor said will endanger Illinoisans — and open the door for others to file suit. Pritzker was made aware of the Clay County Circuit Court ruling Monday afternoon during his live COVID-19 briefing. “Rep. Darren Bailey’s decision to take to the courts to try and dismantle public health directives designed to keep people safe is an insult to all Illinoisans that have been lost during this COVID-19 crisis, and it’s a danger to millions of people who may get ill because of his recklessness,” Pritzker said. “At best, no one is better off because of this...

A Florida judge issued a letter to lawyers in his district reminding them to get out of bed and put on shirts before teleconferencing into online hearings. Judge Dennis Bailey of Broward Circuit Court, which had started holding some hearings virtually using teleconferencing app Zoom, said in a letter posted on the Weston Bar Association website that conducting hearings outside of court is no excuse for letting decorum fall by the wayside. "It is remarkable how many attorneys appear inappropriately on camera," Bailey wrote. "We've seen many lawyers in casual shirts and blouses, with no concern for ill-grooming, in bedrooms...