The Justice Department has filed a judicial misconduct complaint with the Eighth Circuit against all but one of Minnesota’s federal district judges, after most of them spoke to the New York Times about Operation Metro Surge, last winter’s immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities. The complaint names Judges Patrick Schiltz and John Tunheim, says they …
On September 25 eight amicus briefs were filed in support of a lawsuit by Human Rights Watch and three other organizations against the executive order authorizing sanctions on International Criminal Court officials and those who assist the court. The International Criminal Court Bar Association argued that the sanctions threaten the independence of ICC lawyers, and …
Luis Carlos Ugalde and Paulina Creuheras review the 2024 reform that made Mexico’s Supreme Court justices, federal judges and the members of a new Judicial Discipline Tribunal subject to popular election, and that dismantled the career judiciary. Turnout in the June 2025 vote was 12.9 percent, and the National Electoral Institute found that winning candidates …
Seven international and regional legal bodies set out a documented sequence surrounding Zambia’s August 13 general election. On August 24, the penultimate day of the constitutional deadline for filing a presidential election petition, the Constitutional Court, High Court, Supreme Court and other courts across the country were closed and cordoned off by police and military …
Judge Patrick J. Schiltz and six other members of Minnesota’s federal bench gave on-the-record interviews about the winter 2026 immigration crackdown known as Operation Metro Surge. Schiltz, a former Scalia clerk who was chief judge during the operation, said the federal government’s conduct created a grave threat to the rule of law. His district received …
At a September 16 hearing on six district-court nominations, Senator Dick Durbin argued that the Justice Department has lost the presumption of regularity. That presumption is a longstanding judicial doctrine under which courts ordinarily presume that public officers have properly discharged their official duties absent sufficient evidence to the contrary; Durbin used it here to …
The report’s call on the organised bar was tested almost immediately. In a letter dated August 28 and reported on September 3, the Florida Bar declined to investigate James Percival, general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, over posts on his official account naming four sitting federal district judges under the heading “Worst of the …
The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress adopted an amendment to the Lawyers Law on August 28, effective September 1. The revised statute makes support for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party an explicit legal qualification for admission to practice, alongside upholding the Constitution and the socialist rule-of-law system, and adds a provision requiring …
On September 2 the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute condemned the suspension in recent weeks of the licences of around 2,000 lawyers and notaries, both inside Nicaragua and in exile. Those affected received no prior notice, no opportunity to be heard, and no published legal basis; many learned of it only when they tried to file documents or appear in court, or when they noticed changes …
The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights reported on August 29 that Razieh Hashemi, a licensed attorney from Abdanan in Ilam province, was seized by security forces on August 27 without presentation of a warrant and taken to an undisclosed location. Three days later her family’s repeated inquiries had produced no information on her whereabouts, condition, place of detention, or …