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This article looks at some practices of the U.S. relating to international law. It discusses the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the application of key provisions of the securities laws to a private suit involving a so-called foreign cubed securities case. It also explains a ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissing a habeas corpus petition brought by a Guantanamo detainee. In addition, the article discusses an amendment to the state constitution of Oklahoma to bar state courts from applying international or Sharia law.

This article evaluates how the social structure of American legal institutions influenced the diffusion of wrongful-discharge laws over the period 1978–1999, and it assesses whether economic or political variables influenced the diffusion process. The results are surprising and quite striking. Precedents by other courts within the same federal circuit region were generally more influential in the diffusion process than precedents by courts in neighboring states or by courts within the same census or West legal reporting region, even though the precedents were on matters of state law rather than federal law and the decisions were usually made by state courts rather than federal courts. There is some limited evidence that political variables may also have been a factor, but economic variables were not statistically significant, even though the new employment laws may have had important economic consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the ruling of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas on the case concerning the political personality Luis Posada Carriles in April 2011. The court found him not guilty of several charges including obstruction of justice, immigration fraud as well as perjury. He was accused by several U.S. public agencies of lying to federal officers about his past activities in Cuba. He was allegedly involved in the bombing of a Cuban airliner off the coast of Barbados in the Caribbean region.

The article discusses a court case wherein former Central Intelligence Agency contractor David Passaro was convicted on charges for the death of Abdul Wali, an Afghan detainee at a U.S. firebase in Afghanistan. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit denied Passaro's appeal under the U.S. special maritime and territorial jurisdiction statute. The court upheld the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina to sentence Passaro with 100 months in prison.

The article reports that the suit of El-Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries Co. and Salah El Din Ahmed Mohammed Idris against U.S. has been dismissed by the Court of Appeals in March 2009. In defense of the attack on the pharmaceutical plant, the U.S. defended that El-Shifa and Idris were associated to the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden. It notes that the plaintiff attempted to seek relief for several times which include an administrative claim, but was unsuccessful. Their claim, in which the plaintiffs seek 50 million dollars in damages, was dismissed by the D.C. Circuit, holding that the case raised nonjusticiable political questions. The majority said that plaintiffs must show that the justification of Bill Clinton's Administration was false to contradict the judicial decision.