Free Republic

U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam, Jr., on Friday immediately halted the administration’s efforts to redirect military-designated funds for wall construction. His order applies to two high-priority projects to replace 51 miles (82 kilometers) of fence in two areas on the Mexican border. Gilliam issued the ruling after hearing arguments last week in two cases. California and 19 other states brought one lawsuit; the Sierra Club and a coalition of communities along the border brought the other. His ruling was the first of several lawsuits against Trump’s controversial decision to bypass the normal appropriations process to pay for his long-sought wall....

The New York federal judge who ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration must comply with two subpoenas from the House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees has donated in the past to a slew of big-name Democrats -- including two who currently sit on those committees, according to federal election filings. After an hour of oral arguments, Barack Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos ruled the subpoenas to Deutsche Bank and Capital One have "a legitimate legislative purpose," and that Trump was unlikely to prevail in a lawsuit to quash the requests. Judges have the option to recuse themselves if...

Here’s what happened. A suit was filed by WildEarth Guardians, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Western Environmental Law Center prior to the 2016 election. It alleged the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees oil and gas exploration of federal lands, failed to calculate and limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from future oil and gas projects. Judge Rudolph Contreras agreed, ruling that BLM “did not adequately quantify the climate change impacts of oil and gas leasing” and “must consider the cumulative impact of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions” generated by past, present and future BLM leases across the country.

May 13, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Kentucky cannot ban the second-trimester abortion procedure infamous for dismembering babies in the womb, U.S. District Judge Joseph McKinley declared Friday in a ruling state leaders plan to appeal. Last year, Kentucky Republican Gov. Matt Bevin signed HB 454 into law, which bans the dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortion procedure. D&Es are more commonly known as “dismemberment abortions” because they function by tearing a preborn baby apart limb by limb. The left-wing American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) quickly sued, and on Friday McKinley sided with them, the Louisville Courier Journal reports. McKinley, a Bill...

In the Great White North, your fundamental rights aren’t quite as fundamental as they are under the American Constitution. That’s a lesson that’s no doubt sinking in for one man who dared to attempt to exercise some parental control over his 14-year-old daughter when she announced that she now “identifies” as a boy. After refusing to address her by a new name or with male pronouns, the child took her case to court. And now a judge has ordered the father to stop “misgendering” her on pain of jail time. (From our new colleagues at PJ Media) Last month, the...

A 15-year court battle has seemingly come to an end after an L.A. federal judge ruled Tuesday that a Spanish museum which acquired a $30 million painting looted by the Nazis is the work’s rightful owner, and not the San Diego Jewish family of a woman who surrendered it 80 years ago to escape the Holocaust. In his 34-page ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John F. Walter found no evidence the museum knew it was looted art when it took possession in 1993. According to the lawsuit first filed in L.A. federal court in 2005, the Nazis confiscated the painting...

CHICAGO (Fox 32 News) - A judge is set to decide Thursday whether a special prosecutor should investigate Kim Foxx's handling of the Jussie Smollett case, and we’ve now learned that the judge has a son who works in the state's attorney’s office. Judge Leroy Martin Junior is the presiding judge of the Cook County Court's Criminal Division. It's standard procedure for him to preside over the hearing to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Foxx's handling of the Smollett case. But it turns out that Martin's son is a lawyer who works in the Juvenile Division of the state's...

In a ruling that is sure to make Left-wing haters’ heads explode — again — a local judge in Charlottesville, N.C., has ruled that Confederate monuments there are protected by state law and thus cannot be removed. According to local CBS affiliate WCAV, the ruling by Circuit Judge Richard Moore flies in the face of a trend by city councils, schools, and other political subdivisions in removing Confederate historical symbols and markers under pressure from Leftists who claim they are monuments to slavery and ‘white supremacy.’

President Trump has attacked the judiciary like few U.S. leaders before him, disparaging judges and their rulings as “dangerous,” “horrible” and “a complete and total disgrace.” Some of his supporters and fellow Republicans applaud and parrot him, but U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves said he hears something sinister: echoes of a time when the Ku Klux Klan and the architects of the Jim Crow South attacked the courts for chipping away at segregation and racism. In a speech to the University of Virginia School of Law on Thursday, Reeves publicly criticized Trump’s aggressive responses to his administration’s losses in court...

A federal judge delivered a speech Thursday lambasting President Trump’s administration, saying the president has selected judicial nominees that do not represent the diversity of America. During a speech at the University of Virginia School of Law, Judge Carlton W. Reeves, an Obama appointee, compared the president to the Ku Klux Klan and called his administration a “great assault on our judiciary.” “When politicians attack courts as ‘dangerous,’ ‘political,’ and guilty of ‘egregious overreach,’ you can hear the Klan’s lawyers, assailing officers of the court across the South,” the judge said. He noted 90 percent of the president’s picks for...

A conservative victory in Wisconsin now is a done deal in the election to replace retiring uber-liberal Justice Shirley Abrahamson.

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop its new policy of sending asylum-seekers who jumped the border back to Mexico to wait while their cases proceed, ruling Monday that the plan was likely illegal... Judge Richard Seeborg, an Obama appointee to the bench, said... Mexico is so dangerous that making asylum-seekers wait there — even if they’re not from Mexico — is untenable.

The U.S. Senate confirmed a Venezuelan-born Miami lawyer on Thursday to the federal bench in South Florida, the first judicial nominee confirmed after Senate Republicans changed the rules to lessen the power of the minority party during the confirmation process. Roy Altman, a lawyer at Miami firm Podhurst Orseck, was approved by the Senate to be a U.S. district judge in a 66-33 vote on Thursday, with 14 Democrats joining Republicans to confirm him. Republican Sen. Rand Paul joined 30 Democrats and two independents to vote against Altman’s nomination. Altman’s private work was centered on aviation law, and he represented...

by Brian Hayes According to a ruling by Obama-appointed federal Judge Beth Bloom, it is not a crime for an illegal alien to use fake federal documents to obtain a state license. Rubman Ardon Chinchilla is a roofer who lives in Broward County, Florida and has been illegally living in the US for decades. Chinchilla got busted using fake immigration documents in order to obtain a Florida driver’s license and was indicted on two counts of violating federal law. Chinchilla was one of 20 illegal aliens who was arrested for using an “Order of Supervision,” — this is a...

President Donald Trump exceeded his authority when he reversed bans on offshore drilling in vast parts of the Arctic Ocean and dozens of canyons in the Atlantic Ocean, a U.S. judge said in a ruling that restored the Obama-era restrictions. U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason in a decision late Friday threw out Trump’s executive order that overturned the bans that comprised a key part of Obama’s environmental legacy. Presidents have the power under a federal law to remove certain lands from development but cannot revoke those removals, Gleason said. “The wording of President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates...

Estonia, a tiny Northern European nation of fewer than 1.4 million inhabitants, has made impressive strides in digitizing, streamlining, and modernizing its government functions. Estonia famously launched its “e-residency” program that allows practically anybody — including foreigners — to access Estonian government services. Its digital national ID smartcard blazed the trail of next-generation government-issued IDs — despite its (significant) security vulnerabilities. And it’s not just the court system that’s getting an AI overhaul in the country — in fact, AI already has automated a number of government functions. It’s scanning satellite images with algorithms to determine if subsidized farming operations...

A federal judge in Alaska has ruled an executive order by President Donald Trump allowing offshore oil drilling of tens of millions of acres in the Arctic Ocean is "unlawful and invalid." The ruling on Friday from US District Court Judge Sharon Gleason means a drilling ban for much of the Arctic Ocean off of Alaska will go back into effect. On April 28, 2017, Trump issued an executive order reversing three memoranda and one executive order in 2015 and 2016 by then President Barack Obama withdrawing about 125 million acres of the Arctic Ocean from oil leasing. The Obama...

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WHEC) -- It is official. Former Rochester City Court Judge Leticia Astacio confirms to News10NBC that she's running for Rochester City Council. On Monday night, Astacio opened up to News10NBC about her new campaign. Astacio's announcement comes three weeks before her felony trial. She is accused of trying to buy a shotgun at Dick's Sporting Goods, which violates the terms of her probation on her 2016 DWI conviction. If Astacio gets the appropriate amount of signatures, she can run. If she is convicted and sentenced to jail or probation, the New York State Board of Elections says she...

A federal judge struck down a controversial law in North Carolina on Tuesday that banned abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. U.S. District Judge William Osteen declared the ban unconstitutional in response to a 2016 lawsuit filed by several abortion rights organizations. Osteen cited other successful lawsuits around the country that have taken down bans on abortions that were based on weeks of pregnancy or gestational events. His decision will allow women in the state to obtain an abortion at any time prior to the viability of a fetus, which Osteen said would need to be determined on a...

An outrageous ruling from a federal judge will halt hundreds of oil and gas drilling projects across 500 square miles in Wyoming because he says the government did not adequately take into account climate change when granting the leases on public lands. Talk about out-of-control Judiciary. NBC News: U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras in Washington appeared to go a step further than other judges in his order issued late Tuesday. Previous rulings focused on individual lease sales or permits. But Contreras said that when the U.S. Bureau of Land Management auctions public lands for oil and gas leasing, officials must...