In Monday's federal courts roundup, Senator John Ensign (R-NV) has introduced a plan to divide the US Ninth Circuit into three separate circuits. With 28 judges covering nine states and the territory of Guam, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is by far the largest in the country. Ensign also believes the ciruit judges are too liberal and do not represent the views of many western states. AP has the full story.... The US Second Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a method used by several states to control the costs of prescription drugs for low income patients. The method involves states developing preferred drug lists. Drug companies must pay a supplemental rebates to the state to get more expensive drugs on the list. The rebates are used to reduce the cost of drugs on the preferred list. The New York Times has the full story on the ruling from Friday.... A three judge panel of the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in 16 cases at Baylor University Law School this week. Students will get an opportunity to learn by observing the court today through Thursday. AP has the full story.

Here's Monday's legal news from the US Department of Justice. The FBI has turned over almost 800 pages of documents to attorneys representing Leonard Peltier, an American Indian activist who is currently serving two life sentences for the murder of two FBI agents in 1975. AP reports that Peltier requested the documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and so far has received 797 of the 812 documents allegedly withheld from Peltier's defense attorneys during his trial. The FBI withheld the remaining documents citing various exemptions. Peltier's defense team seeks to have his conviction overturned. The FBI has no comment at this time. For more on the FOIA, click here.... As previously reported on JURIST's Paper Chase, the US Supreme Court granted certiorari Monday in a wire fraud case involving three men accused of smuggling alcohol into Canada from the US in order to evade Canadian taxes. In a brief opposing the grant, Solicitor General Theodore Olson had told the Court that although foreign governments are usually barred from using US courts to resolve lost revenue issues, fraud law covers this type of case. AP has more here.

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In international law news Monday, Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has called for changes to the EU Stability and Growth Pact in order to emphasize nurturing economic growth instead of curbing deficits. Five countries, representing approximately 85 percent of economic output in the EU, are in violation of the rules of the pact. Reuters has more. Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's Prime Minister, has responded by calling for the deficit rules to be respected before the Stability and Growth Pact can be reformed. Luxembourg will assume the presidency of the EU at the beginning of next year. AFP has more.

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In Monday's regulations news, the "Puerto Rico for All" organization has announced that gay activists will file a complaint against the Federal Communications Commission. The group believes that homophobic slurs are being aired on Puerto Rican radio and television. See here for more. . . . SBC Communications has reached an agreement with Sage Telecom under which Sage will be able to use SBC phone lines. The FCC is pleased that the companies have reached an agreement since the agency's rules promoting this type cooperation had been thrown out by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. See comments by FCC Chairman Michael Powell here. The Milwaukee Business Journal has more.

Major movers in the 2005 US News and World Report rankings are responding in very different ways to their upward moves. The Washington University in St. Louis School of Law (20, up from 25 in 2004) takes the customary approach, embracing its rise in the rankings while acknowledging limits to the rankings' significance. See WUSTL's release here. Dean W.H. Knight, Jr. of the University of Washington School of Law (34, up from 45), however, claims no such victory in his column today. Instead, he cites measures in which UW must improve if it is to continue to improve its overall ranking. See Dean Knight's column here. Meanwhile, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law (47, up from 51) merely links readers of its website to the rankings, without comment. Finally, in a testament to the influence that the rankings enjoy, the Arizona State University College of Law (53, up from 59) has announced plans to increase its faculty by 25%, explicitly hoping to improve its student/teacher ratio and thus its overall ranking (the measure constitutes 3% of total score in the ranking methodology). See the Arizona Republic's full report here.

In other law school news, Washington University in St. Louis announces its successful recruitment of Professors Sam Bagenstos and Margo Schlanger from Harvard Law School. The Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, meanwhile, has named Professor Lawrence Raful of Creighton University School of Law as its new dean, according to the New York Law Journal. Elsewhere around the country: the San-Antonio Express-News reports on a new terrorism law research center inaugurated Friday at St. Mary's University School of Law; the Kansas City Star reports on a possible downtown move by the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law; the Charleston Business Journal takes stock of the first class of admits at the Charleston School of Law; and the Yale Daily News reports on a false bomb scare at Yale Law School on Saturday.

The US-Canada Power System Outage Task Force concluded Monday in its final report that last summer's massive east coast blackout could have been avoided if utilities had followed the power industry's own reliability rules administered by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC). The report warned that unless those rules and regulations were complied with, another large blackout could occur, a finding which is likely to renew calls for more robust governmental regulation (as suggested, for example, in this August 18 2003 JURIST Forum op-ed by George Washington University Law School professor Richard Pierce). Read the report here [PDF], and an accompanying press release from US Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. NERC offers more information on the blackout investigation here. AP has more. The technical problems that initiated the outage on August 14 were mostly traced to Ohio provider First Energy.

In Monday's corporations and securities law news, former Bank of America Corp. broker Theodore Sihpol III, the first person arrested in New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's mutual fund probe, has been indicted on 40 counts of fraud, grand larceny, and falsifying statements. Sihpol is accused of allowing Canary Capital Partners, a Bank of America client, to place buy and sell orders after the 4 pm market close. The tactic allowed Canary to profit from market-moving information as much as 24 hours before the shares were valued again. Just last month, Bank of America paid a fine of $375 million to settle allegations that the bank's executives allowed improper fund trading. Read the grand jury indictment here[PDF]. Read the original press release from Spitzer announcing the filing of charges here. Bloomberg.com has more.

In other corporations and securities law news, the SEC has begun a formal probe of Nortel Networks Corp. related to the repeated results restatements. The restatements, which have shaken investor confidence, were already part of an informal probe by regulators. Read the Nortel press release updating the SEC inquiry here. Reuters has more.... Last week's stunning $1.6 billion settlement with Sun Microsystems Inc. was unlikely to have an impact on the European Commission's antitrust actions against Microsoft Corp. The Commission said it will stand behind its ruling even though Sun made the initial complaint against Microsoft. AP has more.... The Boston Stock Exchange has announced it will separate its chairman and chief executive officer positions in order to separate its regulatory and business functions. The move, which still needs SEC approval, is similar to the recent changes made at the New York Stock Exchange. Reuters has more.... Janus Capital Group's executive vice president of institutional services, Lars Soderberg, has taken a leave of absence amid allegations of improper trading at the company. Read the Janus press release here. AP has more.... JC Penney will sell its Eckerd drugstore chain to Jean Coutou of Canada and CVS of the US for $4.5 billion in cash. Jean Coutou will gain control of Eckerd stores in the eastern United States while CVS will gain control of stores in the southern United States. Read the JC Penney press release here. The Financial Times has more.

Also today, the US Supreme Court has denied a request from Halliburton Co. to hear an appeal of a $101 million judgment for BJ Services Co. The judgment against Halliburton relates to an infringement of a patented method of extracting oil and gas. The docket number for the case is 03-1025. Read the opinion of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit here. Reuters has more.... Finally, as previously reported on JURIST's Paper Chase, the hold-out juror in the defunct Tyco fraud case says she is being misrepresented by the media as unyielding in her approach to deliberations. AP has more.

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The California Supreme Court Monday overturned a lower court decision in ruling that under California's fetal murder law a murder of a pregnant woman counts as a double homicide even if the murderer did not know the victim was pregnant. AP has more. California Penal Code § 187(a) states, "Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought." The word "fetus" was added in 1970. The law is currently the basis of the prosecution of Scott Peterson in the Laci and Connor Peterson case. President Bush enacted a similar federal law last week. Read the California Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Janice Rogers-Brown (a Bush nominee to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit) here [PDF].

AP is reporting that a jury in Moscow has convicted a Russian arms control researcher of treason for passing military secrets on nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to the United States. The case against Igor Sutyagin, a scholar at Moscow's respected USA and Canada Institute, went to the jury earlier today. It is the first espionage case to be decided in Russia by a jury. The prosecution of Sutyagin has alarmed scientists and human rights activists who fear a new state crackdown on Russian researchers' contacts with the West. From Russia, MosNews.com now has more. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been following Sutyagin's case for almost 4 years.

AP is reporting that an Iraqi judge has issued a murder arrest warrant for anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr (BBC News offers a profile; the Council on Foreign Relations provides this Q & A), blamed for inciting weekend violence in Iraq, in connection with the slaying of a rival Shiite leader in Najaf last year. US Administrator Paul Bremer had previously announced that the Shiite leader had been "outlawed", a declaration that an al-Sadr aide said he was "proud" of, according to a story on AFP. A White House spokesman accused al-Sadr earlier this morning of being an ally of "terrorist organizations", and identified him as "one individual who is seeking to derail democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people. This is one individual who is seeking to undermine the transition process to sovereignty." Reuters has more on the White House comments.

UPDATE: American Forces Press Service now has more. In remarks late Monday morning, President Bush said:

In this particular incident, with Sadr, this is one person who is deciding that rather than allow democracy to flourish, he's going to exercise force. And we just can't let it stand. As I understand, the CPA today announced a warrant for his arrest. This is one person -- this is a person, and followers, who are trying to say, we don't want democracy -- as a matter of fact, we'll decide the course of democracy by the use of force. And that is the opposite of democracy. And it's -- that's why the CPA issued the statement they issued.

Read a White House transcript here.

The US Supreme Court granted certiorari Monday in two cases, Pasquantino v. United States (on wire fraud; read the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decision appealed from here - AP has more), and Illinois v. Caballes (on conditions under which a drug-sniffing dog can check the trunk of a care during a routine traffic stop; read the Illinois Supreme Court decision appealed from here - Bloomberg has more.). The Court's full Order List is here [PDF].

Taiwan's opposition upped the ante in its case against the country's disputed mid-March election Monday when it brought a new challenge before Taiwan's High Court asking it to nullify that poll and order a brand new vote. Opposition presidential candidate Lien Chan had previously asked for a recount. AP has more.

Ruth Jordan, the hold-out Tyco juror who found herself at the center of a media frenzy that ultimately led to a mistrial order last Friday, defended herself in an interview published Monday in New York Newsday. Insisting that she had stood by the concept of the presumption of innocence, she said that she was being unfairly targeted by a fellow-juror in an article coming out in TIME magazine which suggested she had not acted in good faith. Tyco defendants Dennis Kozlowski and Mark H. Swartz meanwhile face the daunting prospect of a retrial, according to this story in today's New York Times.

London's Daily Telegraph reports this morning that British Prime Minister Tony Blair will fly in from London for a special, as-yet-unconfirmed meeting with US President George Bush around Easter to ask him for a one-year delay in the enforcement of new US fingerprinting and photographing rules against visitors from the UK. The US announced the extension of its US-VISIT rules to Britain and other close allies on Friday. Only Canada and Mexico are now exempt from the rules, but the UK Government will ask for more time to give its own citizens appropriate biometric identifiers on its passports that would make the US checks unnecessary. The Telegraph has more.

Six Bosnian Croats accused of the massacre and torture of Muslims in 1993 turned themselves in to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague Monday after flying in from Zagreb. AP has more. Indictments against four of the six had been unsealed on April 2, and are available from the ICTY here.

Continuing violence in Iraq, including major clashes with rioting Shiites in Baghdad and four other cities over the weekend that left eight US soldiers and over 30 Iraqis dead and has resulted in the formal "outlawing" of a top anti-American Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, has prompted new questions about the plausibility of the scheduled June 30 date for a transfer of power from the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority to an Iraqi interim government. On Sunday, Republican Senator Richard Lugar, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called for consideration of a postponement, although the White House stood firm on its original plan. The International Herald Tribune has more.

UPDATE: In remarks Monday morning, President Bush indicated that the June 30th deadline "remains firm." Read a White House transcript here.

Delegates attending a conference in the Rwandan capital Kigali held to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1994 Rwanda genocide in which some 800,000 people were killed in 100 days (see this BBC News backgrounder) said Monday that there could be no reconciliation until the perpetrators of the massacres were brought to justice. Some 80,000 persons are still imprisoned for their roles in the killings, and many leading suspects are still at large abroad. The genocide was set off on April 6, 1994, when a plane carrying Rwanda's Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down over Kigali airport. Recent French reports have alleged that current Rwanda President Paul Kagame ordered the downing, but these reports have been sharply denied. Addressing the conference, Kagame blamed the international community for not preventing the genocide in the first place. BBC News has a report on his speech. Reuters has more. Multiple conferences and ceremonies are taking place around the world to mark the 10th anniversary of the genocide; UN Secretary General Kofi Annan opened a special UN memorial meeting last week. The genocide survivors association Ibuka has an extensive website in French.

In Monday's US law and business press, the ABA Journal reports on a FL county's debate over posting court records online.... The National Law Journal reports that the owner of an IL ceramics studio named "You're Fired" is concerned over Donald Trump's desire to trademark that phrase.... According to the Fulton County Daily Report, the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the PGA Tour can keep Morris Communications and other media companies from selling real-time golf scores online.... The Dallas Business Journal reports that Philadelphia law firm Conrad O'Brien Gellman & Rohn has won a $6 million judgment for former Mobil employees in US district court.... FindLaw's Writ features former White House counsel John W. Dean's commentary on attempts by the press and the government to discredit former White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, as well as UCLA law student Phillip Carter's guest column on legal issues surrounding a possible US response to the recent Fallujah ambush on US contractors.

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A few of the legal stories running in Monday's foreign press... Japan's Daily Yomiuri features a divided Tokyo High Court ruling that will not be resolved by the Supreme Court. The case involves a District Court's temporary injunction against the publication of a magazine article about a former Prime Minister's daughter. The case will not be resolved because the woman has decided to withdraw her appeal.... Switzerland's NZZ Online reports the inauguration of the Federal Penal Court. The Court will specialize in hearing organized crime, white-collar crime and terrorism cases. Critics fear that housing the court in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland will lead to inefficiencies and complicate proceedings.

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On April 5, 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death after a treason trial in which they were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Learn more about the Rosenbergs trial in JURIST's Famous Trials series.