Recently in US Court of Appeals Category

Being cut from a team and losing your athletic scholarship is not grounds for a lawsuit.

That is how the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled after a college basketball player sued her university and coach after losing her athletic scholarship.

The plaintiff, Brooke Elizabeth Heike, was awarded a scholarship by Central Michigan University. When she lost her scholarship she decided to seek legal relief.

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of all claims by five plaintiffs who claimed to have been victims of the CIA's Extraordinary Redition Program. Specifically, the men sued Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Company which the plaintiffs allege provided flight planning and logistical support services to the aircraft and crew used to transport the plaintiffs to detention facilities in Afghanistan and Morocco. At these facilities and others, plaintiffs allege they were interrogated, tortured and detained for multiple years. According to the en banc decision, state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the case "because there is no feasible way to litigate Jeppesen's alleged liability without creating an unjustifiable risk of divulging state secrets."

The government argued that four categories of information are state secrets which must be protected from this lawsuit:

• "information that would tend to confirm or deny whether Jeppesen or any other private entity assisted the CIA with clandestine intelligence activities;"
• "information about whether any foreign government cooperated with the CIA in clandestine intelligence activities;"
• "information about the scope or operation of the CIA terrorist detention and interrogation program;" and
• "any other information concerning CIA clandestine intelligence operations that would tend to reveal intelligence activities, sources, or methods."

The Ninth Circuit stated that secrets within one or more of these categories would be threatened should the lawsuit proceed. It would not say which, for fear of disclosing state secrets.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay in the Prop 8 same sex marriage litigation. The order prevents enforcement of the District Court's order striking down Prop 8, until the Ninth Circuit hears appeals in the case. The Ninth Circuit set a briefing schedule for October and early December, and specifically requested that Prop 8 sponsors address the question of whether they have standing in the case. (See Professor Vikram Amar's commentary in FindLaw's Writ for more on the issue of standing in the Prop 8 litigation.)

A federal appeals court dealt a blow to 'Net Neutrality' supporters today by concluding that the Federal Communications Commission (F.C.C.) lacks the legal authority to manage the network practices of internet service providers (ISPs).

The lawsuit between Comcast and the F.C.C. was triggered by customer discoveries that their ISP "was interfering with their use of peer-to-peer networking applications."

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.