Paper on Federal Courts

The Federal Courts

The recent article I found has a federal appeals court ruling that a group of human-rights activists, lawyers and media groups are allowed to bring a lawsuit challenging new procedures for approving U.S. government electronic surveillance of non-U.S.citizens overseas. This group has apparently originally sued back 2008 claiming, ‘amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act caused them to fear their international communications with individuals overseas will be monitored’ (Bray).In other words, they wanted to be able to protect the confidentiality of those conversations with the overseas individuals they have conversations with regarding work projects.

This article relates to what we have been learning about the Federal Court system in that how this case is being handled in our court system. Mainly I have learned that the courts have two functions, one is for the states and the one is for the government involvement to the nation as a whole. Federal courts basically decide the disputes concerning the Constitution and the laws that our passed by Congress.

Reading this article I was asking myself what jurisdiction the federal courts have in this situation and I have researched that the federal court jurisdiction, for the most part, only hears cases in which the U.S. is a ‘party’ in. Mostly the cases that are involved have the violations of the constitution or federal law.

In 2009 a federal judge dismissed this lawsuit claiming that the plaintiffs could not demonstrate they had been actually injured by the decision yet. However a three- judge panel of the U.S Second Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit recently and remanded it to the district court for more proceedings.

I would like to follow up on how this case is going to be handled simply because I became curious on what both sides are to the story. I seem to understand the plaintiff in this situation regarding the privacy factor, but then again why should the U.S be...