Today the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of James Ford Seale, the ex-Ku Klu Klan member, former Mississippi policeman and sheriff's deputy who was indicted and convicted for his role in the kidnappings and brutal murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore in the summer of 1964.

According to a report in the Jackson Free Press, "the FBI investigation of the Dee-Moore case yielded more than 1,000 pages of files, including informant accounts." In November 1964, then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson's Special Assistant Bill Moyers, that Seale and fellow Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards ""willfully, unlawfully, feloniously and with malice aforethought [for] killing" Dee and Moore.

Seale was never charged until more than forty years later. 

Last week, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision that promises to alter the environmental law landscape. 

In the decision, the court determined that plaintiffs could sue a power generator under federal nuisance law for releasing greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.  In making its ruling, the 2nd circuit overturned the district court, which had declined to hear the case after it held that the claims presented non-justiciable political questions.

The Obama Administration caught a break from two courts yesterday, both of which decided to give the president more time to figure out how he wants to proceed with trials of Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The trial by Military Commission of five high-profile detainees accused of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, including alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was to begin soon.  Two of those men, however, had filed broad constitutional challenges to the military court system at Gitmo in domestic federal courts. 

We all hate spam.  It clogs our inboxes and increases the likelihood of accidentally deleting a legitimate message that gets lumped in with the ads for penis enlargement methods, free worldwide shipping and online pharmaceuticals.  Most of us suffer through the problem in silence and accept it as an unavoidable consequence of life in the digital era, though.

One man, however, tried to turn his hatred of spam into a going concern.  James Gordon attempted to sue spam distributors under the private right of action created by the CAN-SPAM Act after Gordon began receiving unsolicited commercial emails on several email accounts on the domain he leased from godaddy.com.

A federal appeals court rejected a host of legal challenges to the sale of nearly all of Chrysler's assets to let the carmaker emerge from bankruptcy.

In a 53-page opinion, judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously ruled that all of the objections raised by investors and tort lawyers to prevent Chrysler's sale were all "without merit."

The 4th Circuit ruled today that the forced grooming of a Rastafarian man's dreadlocks by South Carolina correctional officers violated his rights under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.  The court simultaneously ruled that the officials had not used excessive force to restrain him, however.

Devotees of the Rastafari movement, or Rastas, typically allow their hair to grow naturally into matted clusters known as dreadlocks.  Dreadlocks have many important meanings for Rastafarians, but they generally demonstrate an individual's dedication to the faith.  Conversely, Rastas associate shaved heads with Western culture, or "Babylon", and the oppression of their spiritual lives and political freedoms.

A federal appeals court ruled that Amir Oveissi's legal claims for wrongful death and the intentional infliction of emotional distress against Iran and its Ministry of Information and Security ('MOIS,' or 'VEVAK' in Farsi) must be considered under French law, allowing him to potentially hold the country and its security apparatus liable for his grandfather Gholam Oveissi's 1984 assassination of in Paris, France.

Gholam Oveissi was a four-star general and Chief of Iran's Armed Forces under the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. At Iran's direction, the Iranian-trained and funded Hezbollah terrorist group assassinated Amir Oveissi's grandfather while operating under the nom-de-guerre "Islamic Jihad."

While the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act ('FSIA') grants foreign countries immunity from being sued under, the federal law also makes an exception for state-sponsored terrorism, allowing plaintiffs to seek damages.

A federal appeals court reversed the U.S. government's decision for denying a Muslim scholar's entry into the U.S., holding that Tariq Ramadan was improperly denied an entry visa by a U.S. Consular official without first being given a chance to show that he knew, or should have known, that he donated money to a European charity that gave funds to Hamas, a U.S. State Department-designated terrorist organization.

The ruling (below) sends the case back to the U.S. District court to allow Ramadan to show "by clear and convincing evidence that he did not know, and reasonably should not have known, that the recipient of his contributions was a terrorist organization."

With convicted Ponzi-scheming hubby Bernard "Bernie" Madoff behind bars for the rest of his life, and the government in possession of all but $2.5 million of the couple's cash, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin approved the return of Ruth Madoff's passport.

Just where will she go?

It's never a good time for a judge to have his large, slightly kinky and, for a time, publicly available collection of sexually explicit material written up in the LA Times.  It was an even worse time for Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit when the LA Times ran a story detailing the extensive collection of suggestive or explicit images and videos on the judge's personal server.

Kozinski was in the middle of an obscenity trial when the story broke, which, needless to say was deliciously ironic and raised a suspicion that somehow the judge could be biased in favor of the defendants.  As a result of the story, Kozinski had to pause the trial to examine whether or not he should recuse himself.  Eventually he did, at the same time declaring a mistrial. 

Kozinski also asked the Ninth Circuit to conduct an inquiry into the report's allegations about him.  The Ninth Circuit in turn asked Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court to transfer the matter to another circuit, which he did, moving the investigation over to the Third Circuit.