A Texas district attorney said his office will ask the state’s highest criminal court to overturn Gov. Greg Abbott’s pardon of a man who killed a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020. Daniel Perry was given a 25-year prison sentence for fatally shooting the 28-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran, Garrett Foster.
Attorney General Merrick Garland forcefully defended the Justice Department before the House Judiciary Committee against “repeated attacks” from Republican lawmakers.
The Georgia Court of Appeals on Wednesday ordered a halt to the proceedings in the election interference case against former president Donald Trump and eight other defendants pending the outcome of their appeal seeking to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis. The order means the case will almost certainly not be scheduled for trial before the fall election.
A majority of surveyed legal professionals are satisfied with their law firms’ attendance policies, a “rather shocking turnaround” from discussions about the issue immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report by the Thomson Reuters Institute.
The attorneys general of 21 states are urging the council for the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to change a law school accreditation standard that encourages diversity in admissions and hiring.
A panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled Monday that an Atlanta-based venture capital firm should be temporarily blocked from issuing grants reserved for Black women-owned businesses, saying that doing so would likely discriminate against business owners of other races.
Evanston, a Chicago suburb, has been credited with launching the country’s first government-funded reparations program for Black Americans. It has paid out nearly $5 million to 193 of the town’s Black residents over the past two years. But now a conservative advocacy group has filed a class-action lawsuit to kill the program, arguing that it discriminates against the suburb’s non-Black residents.
Thousands of Florida residents lose their right to vote every year when they are convicted of a felony. But by a quirk of the law, Florida resident Donald Trump likely will be able to cast a ballot in November despite his convictions this week.
Daniel Small spoke to the ABA Journal about his latest book, Lessons Learned from a Life on Trial: Landmark Cases from a Veteran Litigator and What They Can Teach Trial Lawyers, which was published by ABA Publishing in February.
While legal ethics experts say state judicial oversight tends to be more aggressive than in the federal system, there’s still a wide difference in execution between jurisdictions. In addition, critics say some states need to make their judicial oversight processes and judicial disclosure reports more transparent.
