Search Results for: 2016-09-19

Within the past 12 months, Jacinda Ardern has resigned as New Zealand’s prime minister, former Australian PM Julia Gillard’s famous “misogyny speech” celebrated its tenth anniversary, and the high-profile retrial against Australian Liberal Party staffer Bruce Lehrmann for the alleged rape of colleague Brittany Higgins was dropped for posing a “significant and unacceptable risk” to [...]

It is a dangerous time to be a judge in America. Retired Wisconsin judge John Roemer was killed at his home in June 2022. That same month, US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh narrowly avoided a kidnapping and possible assassination attempt. These incidents follow in the wake of an assassination attempt on U.S. District Court [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) Wednesday criticized repressive measures on civil society groups by European governments considered to be liberal democracies. In a report, HRW expressed alarm at democratic backsliding in “healthy” democracies such as the UK, Italy, Greece and France. According to the V-Dem Institute, the COVID-19 pandemic aggravated democratic backsliding around the world. The [...]

Marisa Wright is a US National Correspondent for JURIST, and a 2L at Harvard Law School.  The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments next Monday in a case that could have major implications for racial equality and college admissions. The case, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, [...]

In 2002, when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey, defeating Kemalist hegemony, there was a glimmer of hope in the West for the overwhelmingly Muslim country. However, the experience of Turkey over the past 20 years is one descending into an authoritarian regime with clampdowns [...]

This commentary was written just before Raila Odinga filed his Supreme Court petition challenging the announced presidential result of Kenya’s general election.  On 9 August, 2022, Kenyans turned out in large droves to elect the fifth president of the Republic of Kenya, and as in previous elections this one was marked by never-ending drama like [...]

On 20 July 2022, a man who had recently lost a parliamentary election was appointed President of Sri Lanka. A closer look at what led to Ranil Wickramasinghe’s presidential reign highlights an array of Constitutional quirks that threaten to continue to undermine democracy in the island nation. Wickramasinghe was hoisted into the presidency after obtaining [...]

The US Supreme Court on Thursday vacated three orders issued by lower courts in Arizona, Indiana, and Arkansas that had invalidated state-level abortion on the grounds of Roe v. Wade. This follows the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe last Friday. The now-vacated Arizona ruling had stopped a state law that criminalized abortions performed on fetuses with non-lethal [...]

JURIST is launching a new series of dispatches from major US states written by JURIST correspondents “on the ground” in those jurisdictions. JURIST Operations Director Ram Eachambadi files this report from Los Angeles. Earlier this month, Los Angeles County filed a petition in California Superior Court to hold Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva in [...]

As conservation organizations and governments around the globe grapple with the devastating effects of climate change and overexploitation, the legal battle fought over the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), one of the world’s most endangered large whale species, may provide insights into how litigation can help—or hinder—efforts to save species from extinction. [...]