In Friday's federal courts roundup, as reported earlier on JURIST's Paper Chase, President Bush has again bypassed the Senate approval process and installed a federal judge using a recess appointment - this time, Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, who has been named to the US Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Here are a few of the reactions to his appointment:

• Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah (Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee): "While my first preference is never a recess appointment, Bill Pryor’s nomination has been unfairly stalled for almost a year without an up or down vote by the full Senate." Read the full press release from Senator Hatch's office.
  
• Senator Patrick Leahy, D-VT (Ranking Member, Senate Judiciary Committee): "Actions like this show the American people that this White House will stop at nothing to try to turn the independent federal judiciary into an arm of the Republican Party." Read the full press release from Senator Leahy's office.
  
• Senator Charles Schumer, D-NY: "Regularly circumventing the advise and consent process is not the way to change the tone in Washington."
  
• Senator John Cornyn, R-TX: "[The appointment is] a constitutional response to an unconstitutional filibuster."

AP has the latest on this story.

In Friday's tax law news, the Financial Times reports that the US Justice Department's Tax Division is investigating tax shelters offered by KPMG. According to KPMG, it no longer offers the tax shelters being investigated and says it will cooperate with the DOJ. KPMG already was under investigation for past tax shelter marketing and sales tactics. Read more here.... TaxNews.com reports that the new dividend tax rates are complicating things for companies who must issue 1099s to taxpayers, leading the Security Industry Association to ask the IRS for relaxed acceptance of extensions. Read more here. View the instructions for 1099-DIV here [PDF].

In immigration law news Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has wrapped up his two-day trip to Mexico by reaching an agreement to repatriate Mexican nationals caught attempting to unlawfully enter the US in their hometowns. While details of the agreement are still to be worked out, Ridge acknowledged that the US was willing to help pay for migrants' flights home, a position US lawmakers have previously opposed due to cost. The repatriation agreement would replace current US policy of simply dropping off Mexican nationals at the border.

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In international law news Friday, Singapore's official participation in the US-sponsored Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) is expected to be approved at an upcoming meeting in March. The PSI pact was initiated by President Bush last year in order to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missile-related materials and technology by means that include the inspection of ships in international waters. The Daily Yomiuri has more. The White House has issued this fact sheet on the PSI. The Bipartisan Security Group, part of the Global Security Institute, offers an analysis [PDF] of some of the legal issues raised by the pact.... According to an Israeli television report Friday, Israel will dismantle a section of its security fence in order to allow residents of a West Bank village more freedom of movement. Reuters has the full story. The International Court of Justice is set to open hearings on the legality of Israel's security fence Monday. The ICJ today released the final schedule of public hearings; other ICJ case materials can be found here. VOA has more on next week's ICJ hearings.... Human Rights Watch today released a new publication which compiles the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The book also organizes the tribunals' decisions by topics that include genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, individual criminal responsibility, command responsibility and sentencing. The new topical digest is available online here. HRW has this press release.

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The prosecution has rested its case in the stock trading trial of Martha Stewart. AP has more.

A day after it was announced that the US would release five Britons and a Dane from US custody at the detention camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, France has called upon the United States to return the (7) French citizens it holds so that they may face legal process in France. The French Foreign Ministry statement is here (in French). Reuters has more.

AP is reporting that President Bush has used a recess appointment to put Alabama Attorney General William Pryor on the US Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The President recently used the same technique of invoking a judicial emergency to get controversial nominee Charles Pickering Sr. on the US Fifth Cicruit Court of Appeals without Senate approval.

UPDATE: In a statement released this afternoon by the White House, President Bush said:

Attorney General Pryor was nominated more than 10 months ago, but still has not received an up-or-down vote in the Senate. A bipartisan majority of Senators supports his confirmation. If Attorney General Pryor were given a vote on the floor of the Senate, he would be confirmed. But a minority of Democratic Senators has been using unprecedented obstructionist tactics to prevent him and other qualified nominees from receiving up-or-down votes. Their tactics are inconsistent with the Senate's constitutional responsibility and are hurting our judicial system.

Read the full text of the President's announcement here.

In Friday's civil rights news, Arizona's Child Protective Services reform, enacted back in December of 2003, took effect today as the first termination of parental rights case began in open court and in front of a jury. Prior to the legislation, termination of parental rights hearings had to take place in front of a juvenile court judge in a closed courtroom. The new system is designed to prevent judges from being biased in making termination decisions. Read the bill here. The Tucson Citizen has more.... The US Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has elected to hear the appeal of a racial discrimination case from Montgomery, AL. The plaintiff, an African-American businessman, alleges Sterling Bank did not grant him a loan because he is a minority. District Court Judge W. Harold Albritton ruled that despite the plaintiff's "impeccable financial record", the bank did not intentionally discriminate against him. The bank points to the fact they have never been accused of being discriminatory in the past. The Montgomery Advertiser has more.

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In Friday's corporations and securities law news, the SEC is investigating Newsday, a newspaper based on Long Island, after a $100 million lawsuit against the company was filed last week. The lawsuit brought by four Queens businesses accuses the paper of improperly boosting circulation figures by encouraging distributors to dump unsold copies in the garbage rather than return them. Read the Newsday press release relating to the lawsuit here. Reuters has more.... Today a close friend of Martha Stewart wavered in her testimony about whether Stewart actually made statements indicating she knew former CEO of ImClone Sam Waksal was dumping his shares in the company. AP has more.... The SEC, over the objections of the NYSE, is recommending a rule which would allow stock trades to go to market with the best price. The "trade-through" rule would allow investors to choose speed of execution over best price. Bloomberg.com has more.... Jury selection in the case against Adelphia Communications founder John Rigas and his two sons begins on Monday. The jury will decide whether Rigas and his two sons stole company funds for their own personal use. Read the SEC complaint against the Rigas family here. Reuters has more.

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Bloomberg.com is reporting that the United States Supreme Court has granted certiorari in the case of Jose Padilla, an American citizen detained as an "enemy combatant" by the US government. Padilla was arrested in 2002 on suspicion of collaborating with the terrorist group al-Qaida to attack American targets with a "dirty bomb" - i.e., a bomb made of radioactive material. He has been detained in South Carolina even though no charges have been filed against him. In December 2003 the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the government could not hold Padilla as an enemy combatant without filing charges and that he should be released with 30 days. The government appealed to the Supreme Court (read its petition [PDF]) and sought expedited consideration [PDF]. Read the Second Circuit's opinion here [PDF]. Bloomberg.com has more.

In environmental law news for Friday, The Washington Post notes that Senators Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Barbara Boxer of California have released a report [PDF] Thursday showing that the federally sponsored toxic waste cleanup program, Superfund, has suffered substantial financial setbacks in the past ten years. The report states that since 1993, Superfund has declined 35 percent in funding, which is the equivalent of $633 million. In order to revitalize the program, both Jeffords and Boxer have called for a reinstatement of an environmental tax on all corporations that expired in 1995. The Bush administration has passed on the opportunity to reauthorize the Superfund tax, instead relying on taxpayer funds and money from identified polluters to pay for cleanups across the country... In other news, following up on a story that I reported on Wednesday, AP notes that American Electric Power (AEP) and Cinergy Corp. have agreed to release pollution-reduction plans and cost estimates for complying with anticipated federal emissions regulations. The plans from the two major utilities will most likely include options for reducing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases associated with global warming. On Wednesday, AEP's chief financial officer Susan Tomasky stated that she expects the US to enact measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in spite of pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. Environmentalists have viewed this as a major step forward to reducing greenhouse emissions as AEP is the largest burner of coal in the US.

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CBC News is reporting that Madam Justice Louise Arbour of the Supreme Court of Canada will be the next UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, succeeding Sergio Vieira de Mello who was killed last year in a suicide bomb attack on UN offices in Baghdad. The appointment is expected to be announced by the United Nations later today. Arbour, appointed to the Canadian high court in 1999, was chief war crimes prosecutor for the UN in the 1990s. CBC News provides a brief biography of Justice Arbour here.

Attorneys for the ACLU and other civil liberties groups have expressed concern about plans for a designated protest area at this summer's Democratic National Convention in Boston. Convention planners have proposed restricting protestors to a triangular-shaped plot of land near the FleetCenter where the convention will take place. Critics say that this would mean that buses, satellite trucks and other large vehicles parked around the Center would make it impossible for the protestors to be seen from there, and that they will take the Party to court if the plan is not changed. When protestors at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles were restricted to a location blocks away from the location of that meeting, a federal judge ruled that the limitation was unconstitutional and that protestors had to be allowed to demonstrate across the street from the convention hall. AP has more.

China says that on Friday it executed a Communist Party official who covered up a 2001 accident at a tin mine that killed 81 people. Wan Ruizhong was found guilty of taking bribes to keep the accident quiet and it was not reported until two weeks after the event. China's Xinhua news agency carries this story. Amnesty International highlighted its concerns over the use of the death penalty in China in an October 2003 report. Estimates on the number of Chinese executions annually run from a little over 1000 (based on public figures) to some 15,000 (broached by researchers purporting to have access to Chinese Communist Party internal documents). Execution was traditionally by shooting, but as noted by the People's Daily, lethal injection was recently introduced as an alternative and has been supported by judges of the Supreme People's Court.

While UK authorities may question the five Britons whose pending release from the US terror detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was announced Thursday (read UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's statement, and see yesterday's coverage on JURIST's Paper Chase), observers say that local prosecutions will be problematic because of inadmissible evidence and the fact that the detainees have already served time. Friday's UK Guardian has more.

Zimbabwean High Court judge Moses Chinhengo resigned for "entirely personal" reasons Friday, becoming the second High Court Justice to leave office in the past month as Zimbabwe's judiciary comes under increasing pressure from the government of President Robert Mugabe (a third High Court Justice, Sandra Mungwira, was said to have fled to the United Kingdom earlier this month, but she appears to have left for extended medical treatment and the Zimbabwean Media and Information Commission has filed a police complaint saying that the original report was criminally defamatory). A colleague, Michael Majuru, left the bench for purportedly medical reasons last month (faxing his resignation from South Africa) after becoming involved in controversy surrounding the government's closure of the Daily Nation independent newspaper. Eight High Court and Supreme Court judges have left office since 2001; in March 2001, Supreme Court Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay was forced to retire after ruling against forcible seizures of white-owned land by pro-Mugabe "war veterans." South Africa's Mail & Guardian has more.

The New Jersey Supreme Court overturned lower court rulings Thursday in holding that a 1997 state law barring suits by uninsured drivers against tortfeasors in auto accidents was in fact constitutional. Justice Barry Albin wrote, "The uninsured driver forfeits the right to sue by failing to comply with a necessary precondition to filing suit: maintaining insurance coverage." One of the lawyers for the uninsured party challenging the state law said that the decision makes New Jersey law the nation's most severe in this respect. Read the opinion here [PDF]. The Property Casualty Insurers of America praised the ruling as providing an incentive for drivers to obtain coverage; read their press release here. AP has more.

Lawyers for convicted DC sniper John Allen Muhammad sought a new trail for their client Thursday, saying that letters that his associate Lee Boyd Malvo sent to another inmate in prison were improperly excluded as evidence. The letters allegedly show that Malvo was not under Muhammad's direction or control, material elements of the law under which Muhammad was convicted of capital murder. The Prince William County Circuit Court Clerk's Office offers images of all documents filed in the Muhammad case. The Washington Post has more, and provides additional background on the DC sniper shootings of 2002.

San Francisco went on the legal offensive in its same-sex marriage initiative Thursday, filing a suit against the state of California alleging that the state law that defines marriage exclusively as a union between a man and a women is discriminatory and unconstitutional. Read their cross-complaint here [PDF]. California Attorney General Bill Lockyer issued a statement saying he would defend the state's marriage law against the city's challenge, which comes as a California Superior Court judge is set Friday to take up once again a conservative group's petition for a restraining order against the city's gay marriages that was put off Tuesday on procedural groups. The San Francisco Chronicle has more.

In Friday's media and information law news, a jury in the United Kingdom has dismissed a libel suit against the Dow Jones Co., owner of the Wall Street Journal, brought by the UK department store chain Harrods, RCFP reports. The dispute between the two started after the Wall Street Journal was fooled by a fake press release issued by Harrods for April Fool's Day 2002 which purported to announce that Harrods was going to "float shares". The WSJ believed the release and ran an article venturing that Harrods might be "the Enron of Britain." Harrods sued. The court found the WSJ article had caused Harrods no harm in the UK.... Three journalists have been arrested for trespass while covering a train derailment in New Jersey, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reports. The journalists were from the Newark Star-Ledger and AP. The journalists were allegedly on the property of the train company, but all three claimed they received permission to be on a the adjacent property of a homeowner. RCFP has more.... BBC News reports that Nigerian authorities have deported a UK journalist for the Economist. Nigerian officials said the action was taken after the journalist's work permit expired, but Silvia Sansoni, the journalist, said the act was retribution for a complaint she made about an official trying to bribe her. BBC News has more.

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The prosecution phase of the Martha Stewart stock trading trial may end Friday once Stewart's lawyers finish cross-examining Mariana Pasternak, a longtime friend of Stewart who testified Thursday that Stewart told her a few days after she sold her ImClone shares that she (Stewart) knew that ImClone founder Sam Watson was selling his own shares in the company, as well as those of his daughter. Prosecutors say they have only a few other additional witnesses to call; once their case concludes, the defense will begin setting out its evidence, which might could include testimony from Stewart herself. CNN has more.

In Friday's US law and business press, the Miami Daily Business Review reports that a FL trial judge will hear details of a proposed $100 million global settlement of a class action suit over the desecration of hundreds of gravesites by cemetery workers in two FL counties.... The New York Law Journal reports that in a case of first impression, a NY judge has ruled that a toy gun that shoots paintballs is an "air gun" under city and state laws and that a teenager and his parents are liable for injuries to another child.... The New York Law Journal also reports that based on improper jury instructions, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a lower court ruling and turned aside a $106 million verdict in a lawsuit over fraudulent loan applications.... The ABA Journal advises attorneys on when they must turn over materials to successor counsel.... FindLaw's Writ features Part 2 of Hastings law professor Vikram David Amar's column on improving jury selection, as well as DC attorney Matt Herrington's book review of Constitutional Law Stories, edited by FindLaw columnist and Columbia law professor Michael C. Dorf.

click for the previous US law and business press review

Some of the legal stories running in Friday's foreign press... Taiwan's Taipei Times reports allegations that People First Party chairman violated the Referendum Law. The law prohibits activities obstructing the upcoming referendum. Critics claim the chairman's comments, intended to discourage voter participation, are criminal.... The Times of India covers the Chief Justice of India's participation in a conference of chief justices in neighboring Pakistan.... In Indonesia, the Jakarta Post features pleas for the Supreme Court to direct all judges to favor application of the Press Law over the 'oft-oppressive' Criminal Code. The Press Council has argued that without application, the freedoms granted by the Press Law would fade away.

click for the previous foreign press review

On February 20, 1809, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in United States v. Peters that the legal power of the federal judiciary is greater than that of any individual state: "If the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery; and the nation is deprived of the means of enforcing its laws by the instrumentality of its own tribunals."