A spokesman for the Iraqi Governing Council said Saturday that negotiations are continuing informally in an urgent effort to resolve a last-minute dispute with Shiite Council members about provisions in Iraq's new interim constitution that was to be signed on Friday. Apparently at the instance of top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani (visit his official website), five Shiite members balked at signing provisions allowing a Kurdish veto of the permanent constitution and providing for a single as opposed to a rotating Presidency. After the collapse of Friday's ceremony, mediated talks with al-Sistani began, presumably with a view to finding some middle ground that would be acceptable to other Council members. "I hope and I pray that we will be able to sign this historic document on Monday morning", one Council member is quoted as saying. A formal statement released Saturday by the Governing Council declaring - perhaps somewhat optimistically - that it would "reconvene on Monday, March 8, to finalize the issue and sign the law" is here. Reuters has more. In his weekly radio address, President Bush meanwhile praised the Iraqi interim constitution as representing "excellent progress " towards democracy in Iraq. Read the White House transcript, or listen to recorded audio.

Saturday's New York Times reports that acting under a White House directive, the US Department of Justice is sending a team of prosecutors and investigators to Iraq to organize the evidence against former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, now in US custody, for an eventual war crimes trial before an Iraqi tribunal. The directive was issued in January and was signed by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. The first members of the team - which will ultimately include some 50 officials - are leaving this weekend. The Times has more. Review the Statute of the Iraqi Special Tribunal for Crimes Against Humanity. Meanwhile the International Committee of the Red Cross said Saturday that on Thursday it had delivered a letter from Hussein to his eldest daughter Raghad Hussein in Jordan. The letter, given to its officials during a recent Red Cross visit to the designated prisoner of war, had been vetted by American authorities but was not publicly disclosed under the terms of the Geneva Conventions. BBC News has more.

In a TV interview to be broadcast Sunday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says he still goes "back and forth" on the issue of same-sex marriage, but supports giving same-sex couples in civil unions equal rights with married couples. AP has more. Bloomberg expressed similar views to journalists at a gay and lesbian fund raising dinner in Manhattan on Thursday evening, according to Saturday's New York Times.

In other developments in the gay marriage saga, San Francisco attorneys argued in briefs filed late Friday with the California Supreme Court that the state constitution did not require local officials to enforce state laws they thought infringed on civil rights. City Attorney Dennis Herrera asked the justices not to "ignore our decentralized, federalist constitutional democracy... Barring local governments from taking independent actions to conform their conduct to the state and federal constitutions would undermine this system of government." San Francisco is asking the Court to allow the legality of same-sex marriage to be determined at trial before the state Supreme Court considers it further. The San Francisco Chronicle has more; see also this report from AP.

Deputy Attorney General James Comey has taken charge of US Justice Department operations following Friday's announcement that Attorney General John Ashcroft had been admitted to hospital, and was in intensive care for the treatment of severe gallstone pancreatitis. The Department's DAG website explains:

The Deputy Attorney General is authorized to exercise all the power and authority of the Attorney General, except where such power or authority is prohibited by law from delegation or has been delegated to another official. In the absence of the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General acts as the Attorney General.

Depending on the progress of his treatment, which could include surgery, Ashcroft could stay in hospital anywhere from a few more days to a month or more. FOXNews has more.

In the wake of Martha Stewart's conviction Friday on 4 counts in connection with her 2001 trade of $228,000 worth of ImClone stock a day before an adverse FDA ruling caused its value to plummet, analysts suggest that arguments at sentencing are likely to focus on a 10-16 month prison term or less, rather than on the 20-years maximum to which she could technically be subject (representing 5 years for each count). The New York Law Journal has more. The US Sentencing Commission provides manuals on the Federal Sentencing Guidelines here. Stewart's business empire started to feel repercussions from the verdict Friday as the stock price of her company Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia slipped 22% when trading resumed after a brief halt, and the CBS network's flagship TV station decided (according to news reports) to pull her syndicated show Martha Stewart Living off the air from Monday, with other CBS affiliates across the country perhaps following suit. AP has more.

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday that the Planned Parenthood Federation of America is not required to compel affiliates around the country to turn over abortion records to the Justice Department, which wants to compile information in support of the recently-passed Partial Birth Abortion Act, now being challenged in the courts. US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton held that the records were ones that "women would not like to share" and that their disclosure would violate the privacy rights of women even if names were removed. The holding in this case does not technically prevent the Department from moving against the Planned Parenthood affiliates individually. Read Judge Hamilton's order here [PDF]. Planned Parenthood welcomed the ruling in a press release. AP has more.

A US Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals panel Friday dismissed a suit brought by Christian broadcaster Kelly McGinley and supporters of ousted Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore claiming that the court-ordered removal of his Ten Commandments monument from the State Judicial Building in Montgomery was unconstitutional as establishing a "nontheistic" religion. The court reasoned that if the argument were upheld, no religious monument could ever be removed because nothing would always remain in its place. Read the opinion here. AP has more.

Here's our review of the major legal news stories that made headlines this week on JURIST's Paper Chase...

• Monday - Members of the Iraqi Governing Council agreed to the draft of an interim constitution for Iraq, two days after the scheduled February 28 deadline. Coalition spokesmen said that the draft would be signed at a ceremony in Baghdad on Wednesday.... The US Supreme Court cited its "historic practice" in referring to Justice Antonin Scalia a Sierra Club motion to have him removed from its energy policy case against Vice President Dick Cheney, with whom Scalia had gone on a controversial duck-hunting trip.... Also Monday, JURIST's Paper Chase was one of the first outlets to report phone calls from Haiti's President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to black legislators and activists in the US claiming that he had not resigned constitutionally, but had been kidnapped by the United States and forced to leave the country.
  
  
• Tuesday - Former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers was indicted on securities fraud charges.... New Paltz New York mayor Jason West was criminally charged for performing same-sex marriages.... And in a bizarre day on the US Senate floor, Senators narrowly approved an extension of the ten year assault-weapons ban and closed the notorious gun show loophole, only to have the Senate's Republican leadership scuttle what was intended to be legislation immunizing the gun industry from lawsuits. Paper Chase Congressional reporter Winston Collier summed up the proceedings.
  
  
• Wednesday - The scheduled signing of the Iraqi interim constitution was postponed until Friday after two bombings of Shiite shrines in Karbala and Baghdad that claimed over 170 lives.... Multnomah County, Oregon's most populated and most liberal county which includes the city of Portland, began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, while in New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer issued a legal opinion saying same-sex marriages there were illegal under state law. JURIST's Paper Chase carried the Spitzer opinion within minutes of it going online.... And in the corporate world, 43% of Walt Disney Company shareholders withheld their support of Chairman Michael Eisner for re-election to the Disney board; at the end of the day the board announced that they would divide the positions of Chairman and CEO and would leave Eisner only in the latter position. JURIST's Paper Chase carried press releases and audio of the shareholders meeting.
  
  
• Thursday - The Library of Congress released the much-anticipated papers of late US Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, throwing new light on the inner workings of the Supreme Court and also revealing some of the legal maneuverings behind the controversial Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey abortion decisions.... In the wake of a Sergeant-at-Arms report that pointed the finger at two former Republican staffers, Senate Democrats called for a full criminal investigation into how Democatic memos on judicial nominees on a Senate Judiciary Committee computer got into the hands of the GOP.... And on the international front, Venezuela's UN envoy resigned in protest at the policies of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, less than 48 hours after Venezuela's National Electoral Council had ruled that the opposition to Chavez had failed to gather enough valid signatures to force a recall vote on the President.
  
  
• Friday - The signing ceremony for Iraq's new interim constitution fell through dramatically when Shiite members of the Governing Council balked at some of the wording at the last minute. After efforts to get the ceremony back on track that day, a Coalition spokesman announced it was being put off indefinitely.... The US Department of Justice announced that Attorney General John Ashcroft had been admitted to hospital and was in intensive care, suffering from severe gallstone pancreatitis.... On the gay marriage front, gay advocacy group Lamba Legal launched a lawsuit to have same-sex marriages fully recognized in New York, a conservative group filed a lawsuit to stop them in Oregon, the Idaho Senate dumped a proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage while the Wisconsin Assembly and the Kansas House approved constitutional bans of their own, San Francisco asked the California Supreme Court to allow the gay marriage question there to go to trial, and New Paltz New York mayor Jason West was ordered by a NY state Supreme Court judge to halt same-sex marriages for a month.... And finally, if all that wasn't enough, Martha Stewart was convicted on all 4 remaining counts of conspiracy, making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice. JURIST's Paper Chase carried live video from WNBC-TV in New York City, and picked up a statement from Martha Stewart's defense website insisting she had done nothing wrong and saying she would appeal.

That was the week. Join JURIST's Paper Chase next Saturday for another look at the legal week in review.

On March 6, 1857, the US Supreme Court announced its landmark decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, holding that blacks - slaves as well as free - were not and could never become citizens of the United States, and that the 1820 Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. Learn more about the Dred Scott case from Washington University in St. Louis (the city where Dred Scott initially filed his suit for freedom and had his case first tried). Review a selection of contemporary newspaper editorials reacting to the decision.