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This article reports on the 2006 Supreme Court ruling regarding the legal status of the detainees held by the U.S. military in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The court declared that the special military tribunals set up to try suspected foreign terrorists in the camp were unlawful under both the Geneva Conventions and American law. The administration of president George W. Bush intends to change the system rather than abolish it. The decision limited presidential power, preserved the constitutional safeguards of civil liberty and entitled combatants protection under the Geneva Conventions.

The article looks at the laws regarding the treatment of "enemy combatants" who are detained by the United States as of July 2004. After al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States President George W. Bush administration moved to claim extraordinary executive powers in the war against terror. As part of its claimed powers, the administration argued that captives from the Afghanistan conflict in 2001 were neither prisoners of war subject to the Geneva Conventions nor ordinary criminals subject to U.S. courts. "Enemy combatants", the administration said, could be held indefinitely, with either no or little judicial review. Foreigners were put in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. On the strength of a two-page affidavit, the United States has held Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Saudi citizen born in Louisiana, in isolation for almost three years. In June 2004, the Supreme Court said that treatment was unconstitutional because it did not give Hamdi due process of law. In the cases both of Hamdi and of another U.S. detainee, José Padilla, the so-called "dirty bomber", whose suit the justices refused to hear on a technicality, the lower courts had ruled that they could be held on "some evidence". The original district court had wanted more evidence than the government's affidavit, but was overruled by a circuit court. Now the circuit court has been overruled, says Neal Sonnett, the head of the American Bar Association's task force on the treatment of enemy combatants, the government's lawyers will have to come up with more evidence to justify Hamdi's continued detention--or go to trial. The day after the court's rulings, the justices held, by six to three, that victims of human-rights abuses anywhere in the world could sue their abusers in U.S. courts.

This article focuses on the legalization of same-sex marriages in Massachusetts and the impending battle between gay activists and social conservatives. Seldom in recent times has a clerical act inspired so much jubilation. One second past midnight on May 17th, gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts, and same-sex couples began to fill out marriage licence applications in Cambridge City Hall, specially opened for the occasion. War is an appropriate metaphor. Supporters, pointing out that May 17th was the 50th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education, claim the ceremonies in Massachusetts mark the biggest advance in civil rights since racial segregation was abolished. Conservatives, who see "the end of western civilisation" in the marriages, look back to 1973 and another Supreme Court ruling: Roe v Wade, which legalised abortion and started a culture war that has lasted for 30 years. Certainly, the full legalisation of gay marriage in Massachusetts took many liberal activists by surprise. Many assumed Vermont's civil unions (non-marriages with most of the legal advantages) would be the best they could get. The right's reaction was less militant than might have been expected. Yet the counterattack is only just around the corner and may precipitate years of conflict. Only a handful of liberal states, including Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York, have suggested they might honour same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts.

The article describes the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on the legality of the new 12th congressional district in North Carolina. The district winds like a broken-backed snake, sometimes no wider than a highway, for 160 miles, linking up pockets of black settlement so that they can return a black representative to U.S. Congress. Stratagems like this are required by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which says that district lines must be drawn to maximize chances for minorities. But the Supreme Court minced no words when it ruled on the 12th district last week. Almost 30 years after the passing of the great civil-rights laws, the United States remains a country typified more by segregation than integration; and segregation is, if anything, on the increase.

This article discusses a court ruling in Great Britain that forbids Natalie Evans from using eggs she had extracted for in vitro fertilization with her partner's sperm before her ovaries were removed because of pre-cancerous tumors. Half a dozen embryos were created and stored. Six months later, when the couple broke up, her partner asked that they be destroyed. But Evans, claiming a fundamental right to a family life, demanded that she be allowed to use them. After a four-year legal battle, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against her.

The article reports that Judge Henry Floyd ruled that United States President George W. Bush cannot hold enemy combatants without trial. Floyd, presiding in a district court in South Carolina, ruled that Bush had greatly exceeded his authority in detaining an American citizen as an enemy combatant for nearly three years without charge or access to a lawyer. Floyd, who was appointed to the federal bench by Bush just two years previously, ordered that the American, José Padilla, be charged with a crime or released within 45 days. In a further blow to the government, two human-rights groups, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First, have filed a lawsuit in a federal court accusing Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, of bearing "direct responsibility" for the torture and abuse of American-held detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. In an action brought on behalf of eight former detainees, they are seeking a court order declaring that Rumsfeld's personal authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques, such as sleep deprivation, threatening with dogs and keeping prisoners for hours in agonizing "stress positions", violated both the American constitution and international law.