Vallejos v Commissioner of Registration
Vallejos and Daniel Domingo appealed their cases to the Court of Final Appeal, and were respectively assigned the case numbers FACV 19 and 20/2012. They would be represented before the CFA by Michael Fordham; David Pannick continued to represent the Government. Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma rejected a further application for joinder by eight-year-old Liang Wing-ki, the Hong Kong-born daughter of mainland parents, whose next friend, mother Li Yinxian, filed suit on her behalf. Philip Dykes, for the applicant, argued that because Vallejos and Domingo's case would touch on issues of interpretation of the Basic Law under Article 158, Liang's interests would also be affected. In rejecting Liang's application, Ma stated: "We feel that the points you seem to argue are adequately covered and will be adequately covered". Liang and other Hong Kong-born children like her were ruled to be entitled to the right of abode in Hong Kong in the 2001 case "Director of Immigration v. Chong Fung Yuen".
Hedges v. Obama
Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint January 13, 2012, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in the case Hedges v. Obama, 12-cv-00331, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan) to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31, 2011. Plaintiffs were journalist Christopher Hedges, Pentagon Papers, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, writer and linguist Noam Chomsky, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir, activist and RevolutionTruth founder Jennifer Bolen, Occupy London activist Kai Wargalla, journalist and founder of "US Day of Rage" Alexa O'Brien, and American academic Cornel West. Besides Barack Obama and Leon Panetta other defendants are John McCain, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor.