Monday's opinion faulted plaintiffs for making "no compelling reason" for the Court to depart from Eldred's holding and explained the Court's stance on copyright term duration as determined by weighing the impetus provided to authors by longer terms against the benefit provided to the public by shorter terms. That weighing is left to Congress, subject to rationality review. The CTEA also retroactively extended statutory copyright protection by another 20 years beyond the original term of the author's life plus 50 years, thus decreasing the number of works entering the public domain. Ownership of orphan works is often difficult to determine, and archives such as Google, Yahoo!, and academic libraries have lobbied for less stringent copyright laws in order to increase the amount of information open to the public domain.

Ramadan lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano argued Sunday that the Appeals Chamber improperly relied on Article 24 of the IHT statute when directing the trial chamber to increase Ramadan's sentence.

Hillary Clinton thinks that in the increasingly crowded field of potential presidential candidates, she's the one who can best confront the nation's challenges.

"I am worried about the future of our country and I want to help put it back on the right course, and I believe that I am best positioned to be able to do that," Clinton said.

Former San Antonio Police Officer Dean Gutierrez was sentenced today in federal court to 24 years and four months in prison for violating the civil rights of a citizen whom Gutierrez detained while on duty, the Justice Department announced today.

Gutierrez was previously found guilty of sexually and physically assaulting a transgendered individual, who was 21 years-old at the time of the assault. On the night of June 10, 2005, Gutierrez detained and then drove the victim to a secluded location. Gutierrez then proceeded to beat and rape the victim.

“Officers of the law bear the special responsibility of upholding justice and protecting the rights of all citizens,” said Wan J. Kim, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “The defendant in this case brutally violated that responsibility. The Justice Department will continue to vigorously prosecute these cases.”

The Civil Rights Division is committed to the vigorous enforcement of every federal criminal civil rights statute, such as those laws that prohibit the willful use of excessive force or other acts of misconduct by law enforcement officials. In fact, the Division has compiled a significant record on criminal civil rights prosecutions in the last six years. In fiscal year 2006, nearly 50 percent of the cases brought by the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division involved such prosecutions. Since fiscal year 2001, the Division has convicted 50 percent more defendants for excessive force and official misconduct than in the preceding six years.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Baumann and Civil Rights Division attorney Jim Felte prosecuted this case for the government.

In the consolidated cases of Jones v. Bock and Williams v. Overton, the Court rejected rules established by the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit as to when a prisoner can file a lawsuit contesting prison conditions under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PLRA). According to the Court, the PLRA "requires prisoners to exhaust prison grievance procedures before filing suit," but Sixth Circuit rules concerning when a prisoner has exhausted other administrative procedures go too far:

The Sixth Circuit, along with some other lower courts, adopted several procedural rules designed to implement this exhaustion requirement and facilitate early judicial screening. These rules require a prisoner to allege and demonstrate exhaustion in his complaint, permit suit only against defendants who were identified by the prisoner in his grievance, and require courts to dismiss the entire action if the prisoner fails to satisfy the exhaustion requirement as to any single claim in his complaint. Other lower courts declined to adopt such rules. We granted certiorari to resolve the conflict and now conclude that these rules are not required by the PLRA, and that crafting and imposing them exceeds the proper limits on the judicial role.