Free Republic

A federal judge in New York on Wednesday struck down a new Trump administration rule that would have allowed health care clinicians to refuse to provide abortions for moral or religious reasons. U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York rejected the federal rule after women's groups, health organizations and multiple states sued the Department of Health and Human Services, arguing the exemptions were unconstitutional. snip "The refusal of care rule was an unlawful attempt to allow health care providers to openly discriminate and refuse to provide necessary health care to patients based on providers’...

Californians fed up with being charged for ending their cell phone service prematurely won a major victory in a Bay Area court decision that concluded such fees violate state law. In a preliminary ruling Monday, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Bonnie Sabraw said Sprint Nextel must pay California mobile-phone consumers $18.2 million as part of a class-action lawsuit challenging early termination fees. Though the decision could be appealed, it's the first in the country to declare the fees illegal in a state and could affect other similar lawsuits, with broad implications for the nation's fast-growing legions of cell phone users....

WASHINGTON (May 20) - The U.S. discriminates against blind people by printing paper money that makes it impossible for them to distinguish among the bills' varying values, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The ruling upholds a decision by a lower court in 2006. It could force the Treasury Department to redesign its money. Suggested changes have ranged from making bills different sizes to printing them with raised markings.

Youths 18 through 20 may now legally possess handguns under a state Supreme Court ruling issued this morning. The five-member court unanimously said the state law banning those under 21 from possessing handguns violated the state constitution. The justices upheld a lower court ruling that threw out a York County indictment on that charge against Berry Scott Bolin. The ruling mirrors a new state law that lowers the minimum age for S.C. residents to own a handgun to 18. Bolin was 19 when he was charged in connection with the February 2006 shooting death of Bobby Royce Hovis III, 19....

DES MOINES, Iowa -- A Polk County judge has struck down Iowa's law preserving marriage for only a man and a woman. He ordered the county recorder's office to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Six gay and lesbian couples went to court for the right to legally marry in Iowa. Lamda Legal filed a lawsuit in 2005 on behalf of the couples in Iowa, saying they deserve equal protection under the law. Des Moines laywer Dennis Johnson represented six gay couples who filed the lawsuit after they were denied marriage licenses, and he says Hanson's ruling is a moral...

January 05, 2006, 3:59 p.m. Now Judges Are Leaking FISA judges discuss NSA surveillance with the Washington Post. On Thursday morning, the Washington Post published an article ("Surveillance Court Is Seeking Answers — Judges Were Unaware of Eavesdropping") that is jaw-dropping in the matter-of-factness with which reports on an outrageous impropriety by at least two FISA court judges. The backdrop is that of the eleven judges who sit on the special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, only one, Chief Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, was briefed by administration officials about the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping program prior to its...

A Billion, Six For KC What are the prospects of reclaiming systematic schooling so it serves the general welfare? Surely the possibility of recharging the system when so many seem to desire such a course would be the best refutation of my buried thesis—that no trustworthy change is possible, that the school machine must be shattered into a hundred thousand parts before the pledges made in the founding documents of this country have a chance to be honored again. No one serves better as an emblem of the hopelessness of a gradual course of school reform or one that follows...

“The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior ... In all the other Cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make” – United States Constitution, Article III, Sections 1 and 2. That piercing scream you'll hear any day now is the leftist juggernaut in America being neutered without the blessings of anesthetic. The left, it appears, has been too busy reading homoerotic poetry tucked away inside an upside-down Marx and Engles book...