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Government transparency is a key component of democratic accountability. The U.S. Congress and the president have created multiple legislative avenues to facilitate executive branch transparency with the public. However, when the executive branch withholds requested information from the public, the federal judiciary has the power to determine whether agencies must release documents and information to requestors. When enforcing standards of executive branch transparency, judges must balance concerns of executive autonomy and judicial intrusion into administrative decisionmaking. While much judicial scholarship focuses on the decisionmaking on high courts, in the U.S. context, federal district courts play a key role in adjudicating transparency disputes. In this article, I examine case outcomes in disputes involving agency claims of deliberative process privilege over internal agency documents litigated between 1994 and 2004. I find that U.S. federal district courts largely defer to administrative agencies in transparency disputes. However, factors such as agency structure and the congruence between judicial and administrative agency policy preferences influence whether federal judges require executive branch officials to release requested information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont case Jimmo v. Sebelius (Jimmo) which deals with local coverage determinations (LCDs) regarding Medicare health insurance coverage, and it mentions the potential impact that a settlement in the Jimmo case might have the medical care that is provided to minimally conscious state (MCS) patients and people with severe brain injuries. Improvement and maintenance medical treatment standards are also assessed.

This case study of Lee v. Macon County Board of Education demonstrates that a federal district court in Alabama, enforcing Brown v. Board of Education, brought about significant social change despite constraints on the courts. The court's application of Brown played a decisive role in ending the racial caste system in this Alabama Black Belt county. The court, by adding the U. S. Department of Justice as a party, overcame constraints that had precluded the executive branch from pursuing school desegregation. Change came through the courts before Congress legislated against school segregation. Seekers of social change must evaluate the constraints on the courts relative to the constraints on the other branches and levels of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of mass immigration from Latin America, legal scholars have shifted focus from racial to ethnic inequality under the law. A series of studies now suggest that Hispanics may be the most disadvantaged group in U. S. courts, yet this body of work has yet to fully engage the role of citizenship status. The present research examines the punishment consequences for non- U. S. citizens sentenced in federal courts between 1992 and 2009. Drawing from work in citizenship studies and sociolegal inequality, I hypothesize that nonstate members will be punished more severely than U. S. citizens, and any trends in Hispanic ethnicity over this period will be linked to punitive changes in the treatment of noncitizens. In line with this hypothesis, results indicate a considerable punishment gap between citizens and noncitizens-larger than minority-white disparities. Additionally, this citizenship 'penalty' has increased at the incarceration stage, explaining the majority of the increase in Hispanic-white disparity over the past two decades. As international migration increases, these findings call for greater theoretical and empirical breadth in legal inequality research beyond traditional emphases, such as race and ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Supreme Court takes action, it establishes national policy within an issue area. A traditional, legal view holds that the decisions of the Court settle questions of law and thereby close the door on future litigation, reducing the need for future attention to that issue. Alternatively, an emerging interest group perspective suggests the Court, in deciding cases, provides signals that encourage additional attention to particular issues. I examine these competing perspectives of what happens in the federal courts after Supreme Court decisions. My results indicate that while Supreme Court decisions generally settle areas of law in terms of overall litigation rates, they also introduce new information that leads to increases in the attention of judges and interest groups to those particular issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 30 years many observers of the federal courts have expressed concern over mounting dockets, arguing that the taxing workloads for federal judges could have a variety of negative consequences, including difficulties in judicial recruitment and retention. However, assessing the plausibility of those and similar claims requires the use of appropriate measures of judges' workload. We introduce scholars and practitioners to new measures of caseload for the district courts available from 1964 through 2012. We detail the methodology for constructing our measures and then assess changes in caseload over time, both within and across courts. We argue that, in most cases, the preferred measure of caseload incorporates weighted filings and accounts for the service of senior status judges and vacancies. We conclude by pointing scholars toward additional research avenues that can be undertaken with our publicly available data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.