News Archive

After traveling 33 hours by plane, car and boat, second-year law student Guillermo Jover-Cataldi arrived in a rural Cambodian district and finally met the people he was hoping to help. The villagers there “depend on the forest for everything — for food, for wood, for product to sell at market,”

A former Marine Corps prosecutor who refused to prosecute a suspected terrorist held at Guantanamo Bay spoke at the Law School on Tuesday at an event sponsored by the Law Christian Fellowship. When Lt. Col. V. Stuart Couch joined the Office of Military Commissions in August 2003, Sept. 11 was an

Justice remains elusive in Lebanon three years after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, said former Lebanese presidential candidate and current visiting law professor Chibli Mallat on Friday. “This is a case of justice so long delayed that one wonders whether it is going to be denied

A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision paves the way for a new round of hearings for Guantanamo Bay prisoners, but leaves several procedural questions open, according to a panel of legal experts who convened Oct. 1 at the Law School. The panel, which included members from academia, the military, the U

Debates over how to best address global climate change go on as if all of the world’s countries had the same sorts of economic, legal, and cultural frameworks, suggested Ruth Greenspan Bell at a Virginia Environmental Law Journal symposium Friday.

Adopting a policy of cruelty towards its detainees will have a devastating effect on the United States, said Alberto J. Mora, former general counsel to the Department of the Navy, in a keynote address at the J.B. Moore Society of International Law Symposium, “International Law at a Crossroads,” hosted by the Law School and the Miller Center of Public Affairs Feb. 23.

After a toughly worded opinion from the Supreme Court slapping down the Bush administration’s detention of terrorism suspects without criminal charges, the president’s response, a Military Commissions Bill, also looks problematic and likely will not be acted on in the current congressional session, said panelists at a Law School event Sept. 6.

The controversial use of extraordinary renditions to interrogate or detain suspected terrorists has evolved since its first use by the United States in 1995, but the practice fails to address concerns about torture and may be ineffective in quashing terrorism, said panelists at a Feb. 16 discussion at the Law School.

Although it's the size of Virginia and North Carolina combined and has a population of more than 18 million, Syria has for the most part managed to keep its doors closed to inquisitive human rights scholars.

A career combating human rights abuses is the most rewarding a lawyer could undertake, co-founder of EarthRights International Katie Redford '95 told the crowd in Caplin Auditorium to open the sixth annual Conference on Public Service & the Law Feb. 11.

The Arab militia who raid and plunder Sudan's Darfur villages are often aided by government air forces, so they took no notice when then-USAID administrator Roger Winter gave State Department officials a bird's-eye view of the atrocities perpetrated on the people of western Sudan in February 2004.

Third-year law student Anishah Cumber noticed a frightening trend during her summer job with Maryland Legal Aid's family law division: female immigrants from South Asian countries like Pakistan and India faced particular hardships because they often didn't know their legal rights and lacked the kind of social support networks that could help.

Chinese lawmakers are showing a willingness to codify greater protection for freedom of expression in their revisions of tort law, according to Virginia law professor Kenneth Abraham , who met with legislative staff and their academic advisors in Beijing recently for a two-day workshop on issues related to defamation of character and invasion of privacy.

The Supreme Court left the door open for prosecution of international human rights violators in U.S. civil courts and reaffirmed prior lower court decisions with its Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain decision, according to a panel of legal experts who spoke at the Law School Sept. 10, but the future of such litigation remains unclear without legislation dictating a framework to decide such cases, some panelists argued.