Following accolades earlier today by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. after Associate Justice John Paul Stevens announced his impending retirement, his other seven colleagues also weighed in with statements of praise for his extraordinary achievements during his 34 years on the bench of the nation’s top…
Updated: Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. has not exactly faded into oblivion since his 1997 death, having been memorialized in busts, buildings and, last year, a U.S. postage stamp.
Born biologically male, Norrie May-Welby, now 48, had a sex-change operation and became female 20 years ago. Now May-Welby has broken new ground and become a person legally recognized as having an unspecified gender, in what may be a world first, the Telegraph reports. As the Scavenger apparently first reported…
Any relief that a California judge may have felt over an agreement to settle a 13-year litigation battle by donating O.J. Simpson’s lucky suit to the Smithsonian Institution was short-lived. Hard on the heels of the agreement that the donation would settle a dispute over the ownership of the tan…
After South Carolina became the butt of jokes because of a decades-old law on the books that requires any group planning to overthrow the government to register its activities, lawmakers there are poised to repeal the legislation. State Sen. Larry Martin told the Associated Press this week that the 1951…
Victims of Bernard Madoff’s stunning Ponzi scheme argued that they should be reimbursed based on the balances shown in their investment statements for his purported hedge fund. But U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Burton Lifland sided with trustee Irving Picard, agreeing that investors’ losses should be calculated simply by adding up the…
Demonstrators picketed their Greenwich Village home. Bullets came in the mail. Their father opened packages in the basement lest they contained explosives.
In a series of new investigations related to the prior conduct of a biology professor accused of shooting three colleagues to death and wounding three others at a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama at Huntsville earlier this month, at least three unrelated probes are now being conducted in…
Perhaps there are legitimate reasons for displaying iconic items used in horrific crimes, such as the tan Volkswagen Beetle in which notorious serial killer Ted Bundy reportedly abducted a number of his actual and alleged victims. According to a National Museum of Crime & Punishment press release announcing the addition…
As lawyers argue about the intent of the drafters of the Constitution and judges mull the issue before deciding civil rights cases, a little-noticed phenomenon also has significant influence on the nation’s understanding of the fundamental principles underlying American law. That is the influence of the Texas State Board of…
In a find of a lifetime, researcher Lorianne Updike Toler discovered that papers she was examining were an early draft of the U.S. Constitution, in the handwriting of framer James Wilson, of “We The People” fame. Toler, a lawyer and founder of the nonprofit Constitutional Sources Project, had been examining…
