French President Jacques Chirac said Monday evening in an interview on French television that France will cast its Security Council veto against a second US-UK draft resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. Watch the full interview with President Chirac on France 2 [in French]. Earlier in the day, as reported in the English-language Moscow Times, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov had said that Russia would vote against the resolution as presently worded. Without explicitly referring to either of these developments, the State Department indicated late Monday that the United States would not ask the Security Council to vote on the resolution (originally scheduled for consideration Tuesday) until later in the week.

President Bush's Executive Order issued Friday - and previously reported on JURIST - freezing US assets of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe and 76 associates in light of the threat to US foreign policy due to what the US considers the "breakdown of the rule of law" in that country is now available online from the White House.

In a news conference in Geneva today UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that "if the US and others were to go outside the Council and take military action [against Iraq] it would not be in conformity with the Charter." Read a full transcript of his remarks from the UN.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Orrin Hatch discussed the judicial confirmations process at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC Monday. Watch recorded video of his remarks on C-SPAN.

As reported in Monday's Washington Post, former FBI Director William Sessions, former US Court of Appeals Judges Timothy Lewis and John Gibbons (3rd Circuit) and former US Attorney for Chicago and co-chair of the Illinois Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment Thomas Sullivan have filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court asking it to review the case of Delma Banks, scheduled to be executed in Texas Wednesday. The brief, which focuses on critical questions regarding prosecutorial suppression of evidence and ineffective assistance of counsel at Banks' trial, can be read here[PDF].

The International Court of Justice at The Hague concluded public hearings Friday in the case of Iran v. United States, arising out of the destruction of several offshore Iranian oil-drilling platforms by US destroyers in 1987 and 1988. The Court is now set to begin deliberations.

Also from Goldstein & Howe in DC: "The Court granted cert. today in (i) No. 02-693, Lamie v. U.S. Trustee (which involves the availability of attorney's fees in bankruptcy) [disclosure: we represent the petitioner]; (ii) No. 02-628, Frew v. Hawkins (which involves a state's immunity from a consent decree); (iii) No. 02-682, Verizon v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko (which is a telecommunications antitrust case); and (iv) No. 02-6320, Fellers v. United States (which may involve a Miranda question, we're checking)."

UPDATE [2:19 PM ET]: Further information on the grants is now available from G&H.

From DC Supreme Court litigators Goldstein & Howe:

The Court today affirmed in two cases. In No. 01-1572, Cook County v. U.S.[PDF], Justice Souter held for a unanimous Court that local govenrments, unlike States, are 'persons' subject to qui tam actions under the False Claims Act.... In No. 01-963, Norfolk & Western Railway v. Ayers[PDF], Justice Ginsburg held for a unanimous Court that damages awarded under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act (FELA) need not be apportioned according to causal contribution among even absent joint tortfeasors. For a five-Justice majority, Justice Ginsburg further held that mental anguish damages resulting from the fear of developing cancer may be recovered under FELA by a railroad worker suffering from the actionable injury asbestosis caused by work-related exposure to asbestos. On this question Justice Kennedy dissented, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices O'Connor and Breyer, and Justice Breyer also filed a separate partial dissent explaining why he did not join the majority opinion on the mental anguish damages holding.

HTML versions of Cook County and Norfolk & Western Railway are available from Cornell's Legal Information Institute.

Yale Law's Jack Balkin has been reading Deborah Sontag's Sunday New York Times article on the US Fouth Circuit Court of Appeals, and reflects on the importance of so-called "inferior courts."

Lawrence Solum of Loyola Law School Los Angeles continues his online debate with colleague Rick Hasen on politics and judging.

Tung Yin at the University of Iowa College of Law reports in his weblog on a affirmative action debate Friday that featured James Lindgren of Northwestern University School of Law, and offers his thoughts on the Gratz case and the diversity rationale for affirmative action admissions.

New and interesting papers on SSRN today include:

School Vouchers and the Constitution - Permissible, Impermissible, or Required?
by Gary Simson of Cornell Law School
From the Abstract: "This article focuses on two Supreme Court decisions with major implications for the constitutionality of school vouchers: Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925, which held on due process grounds that the state cannot compel parents to send their children to public school; and Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002, which held that vouchers for parochial school education do not violate the Establishment Clause."

Leaving the Empty Vessel of "Republicanism" Unfilled: An Argument for the Continued Non-Justiciability of Guarantee Clause Cases
by Richard Hasen of Loyola Law School Los Angeles
From the Abstract: "Many commentators trace the beginning of the end of the political question doctrine to the Supreme Court's 1962 Baker v. Carr decision. In Baker, as Mark Tushnet has explained, the Court domesticated the doctrine by reducing it from an amorphous prudential doctrine to a set of six legal rules. If the political question doctrine continues to have any vitality, it is in the area of foreign and in cases raising "Guarantee Clause" claims. I ignore the foreign affairs area and focus on the Guarantee Clause. Cases raising Guarantee Clause claims now stand on the cusp of justiciability."

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is in The Hague this week for Tuesday's inauguration of the new International Criminal Court. Details on inauguration events[PDF] at The Hague and elsewhere are available from the Coalition for the International Criminal Court.

Victor Williams of Catholic University School of Law says that a recess appointment for Miguel Estrada could be the way out of the current confirmation stand-off (which, by the way, resumes in the Senate at 2 PM this afternoon). Read his op-ed in Monday's National Law Journal.

UPDATE [4:20 PM ET]: Judicial nominations guru Howard Bashman suggests that Williams' idea should be taken with a very large grain of salt. See his 2001 article, Questioning the Constitutionality of Recess Appointments to the Federal Judiciary.

Notes from last Wednesday's Supreme Court oral arguments in the CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) library-filtering case have been posted online by Skip Auld, Assistant Director of the Chesterfield County (VA) Public Library, who was in the courtroom. An official transcript is not yet available. [LawMeme]

In an internal report some details of which were released Monday, the US Department of Justice auditor found that the capability of INS screening staff at airports to analyze advance passenger information so as to identify high-risk and inadmissible travelers entering the United States was "limited due to the lack of adequate resources," and that existing procedures did not always provide INS inspectors critical information on such passengers. An executive summary of the DOJ report is available online.

In an online exclusive, JURIST announced Monday that leading critical race theorist Richard Delgado and noted legal writer Jean Stefancic have been named to two new professorships at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law designated in honor of Derrick Bell, a pioneer of the critical race movement and a 1957 Pitt Law graduate. Delgado and Stefancic come to Pittsburgh from the University of Colorado School of Law at Boulder; their appointments will be effective in May.

Delgado - who's been called the most prolific and one of the most influential legal scholars in America - told JURIST Sunday: "I'm delighted at the prospect of joining the outstanding Pittsburgh law faculty, reaping the benefits of the new Center on Race and Social Problems, meeting the Pittsburgh community, and --after 14 years in Colorado--enjoying some good ethnic food!" Stefancic added, "My friends say, "You're leaving Colorado for Pittsburgh?" And I say, "Who wouldn't want to join an energetic vital law school, be part of a dynamic urban university, and live in a charming historical city?" I can't wait to get there!" Read the full press release exclusively online on JURIST.

On March 10, 1969, James Earl Ray was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the murder of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.. Ray died in 1998, still seeking a retrial of his case. On December 9th, 1999, a Memphis jury handed down a verdict agreeing with the King family that the 1968 assassination of the civil rights leader was a conspiracy rather than the act of a lone gunman. Learn more about the trial and the assassination from The King Center in Atlanta.