Congressional approval of one of the largest class action settlements in U.S. history is getting hung up on the issue of legal fees for plaintiffs lawyers.

The $3.4 billion Indian trusts settlement agreed to in December could be scuttled if Congress doesn't approve the terms of the agreement by May 28, according to The Associated Press.

The tentative settlement would close the books on a class action filed in 1996 on behalf of 300,000 American Indians. The plaintiffs in the suit claimed that as trustee for 145 million acres of land under the Dawes Act of 1887, the U.S. Department of the Interior mismanaged trust accounts and allowed the federal government to give the best land to white settlers. The settlement calls for plaintiffs to be paid $1.4 billion -- about $1,500 per class member- -- and for a $2 billion fund to be set up to buy American Indian land.

The potential snag now, as reported by sibling publication The Blog of Legal Times, is a move by Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming to cap attorney fees in the case at $50 million. That has one of the plaintiffs lawyers who spent years litigating the matter crying foul.

Dennis Gingold -- a solo practitioner in Washington, D.C., who serves as lead counsel to the plaintiffs -- told the AP that he will terminate the settlement and resume litigation unless Congress approves the agreement without altering any of its terms. Gingold told The BLT that Barrasso's sentiments fly in the face of a previous fee cap of $100 million agreed to in December, which would give Gingold and his co-counsel at Kilpatrick Stockton fees totaling between $50 million and $100 million.

Were Gingold and Kilpatrick Stockton to split $100 million, they would be taking a total cut of roughly 7 percent of the $1.4 billion settlement figure; the lawyers' share shrinks to about 3 percent if the $2 billion trust called for under the proposed settlement is figured in. Either way, the fees would be well below what has been paid out to plaintiffs lawyers in other major class actions such as the one against Enron, as noted by lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell, a former treasurer of Montana's Blackfeet Nation, in a story by Legal Newsline.

An anti-abortion protester arrested in 2007 had a First Amendment right to demonstrate on a sidewalk near the entrance the building that houses the Liberty Bell, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The decision overturns lower-court rulings that upheld the arrest of Christian evangelical leader Michael Marcavage. Marcavage, who lives in suburban Lansdowne, had been sentenced to a year's probation for refusing a National Park Service order to move to a nearby designated demonstration area.

The appeals court tossed the two charges on free-speech and procedural grounds. The three-judge panel said Marcavage caused no more of a disturbance than other people near the Liberty Bell entrance, including a cancer-survivors group and the drivers of horse-drawn carriages hawking their services.

Marcavage founded a group, Repent America, that opposes abortion, homosexuality and the teaching of evolution.

He has been arrested repeatedly during protests up and down the East Coast. He successfully challenged a 2004 arrest for picketing at a Philadelphia street festival for gays and lesbians, but a Massachusetts court last year upheld a disorderly conduct conviction based on his refusal to stop using a megaphone at Salem's famed Halloween celebration.

Nearly a year after he went from anonymity to notoriety, Michael Jackson's doctor returns to court for a pretrial hearing that will determine when he goes to trial and what he will be able to do in the meantime.

Dr. Conrad Murray is likely to face the usual placards and catcalls from Jackson fans denouncing him outside the courthouse and members of Jackson's family glaring at him inside the courtroom Monday.

First on the agenda will be Murray's fight to retain his California medical license. He has not been practicing in the state, but his attorney, Ed Chernoff, has maintained that loss of his license here would have a domino effect on his practices in Texas and Nevada.

Chernoff said in documents filed Friday that those two states have reached agreements to allow Murray to practice as long as he abides by a judge's order not to administer anesthetics such as propofol, which was blamed in Jackson's death.

St. James Anglican Church, a theologically conservative breakaway church, has waged a nearly six-year fight to keep the church property instead of returning it to the Diocese of Los Angeles.

St. James is one of several dozen individual parishes and four dioceses nationwide that voted to split from the national church after the 2003 consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop.

State courts have sided with the Los Angeles diocese throughout the six-year legal case. The church lost its petition to have the case heard in the U.S. Supreme Court last year.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan reversed the district court's ruling that ordered the nation's largest police department to turn over secret "field reports" to protesters who sued the city over their arrests.

The ruling said that the city "met its burden of showing that law enforcement privilege applies to field reports — even as redacted by the district court — because the reports contain detailed information about the NYPD's undercover law enforcement techniques and procedures."

Before the convention, members of the NYPD's Intelligence Division went undercover and infiltrated protest groups that wanted to disrupt the convention. Information in the undisclosed documents "reinforces the city's assertions that the public faced a substantial threat of disruption and violence during the RNC," the appeals court wrote.

Former Twin Cities attorney Michael S. Margulies pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to wire fraud, admitting that he embezzled $2 million from his former law firm and its clients.

The plea was the result of a deal Margulies, 56, struck with federal prosecutors. U.S. District Judge David Doty accepted the plea and ordered a presentence investigation to help him decide what punishment the former real estate attorney should get when he's sentenced.

Federal sentencing guidelines call for a maximum of 20 years in prison on wire fraud.

Margulies was released until sentencing, with no date set.

The plea came 13 days after Margulies was charged with a single count of wire fraud. The felony charge was the most recent event in a fallen career.

Margulies had been a partner at Lindquist & Vennum, one of the Twin Cities' most prestigious law firms, and he lived in a $1.5 million mansion on St. Paul's Summit Avenue. He was a member of the St. Paul Planning Commission and served on the board of the Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis.

But in March, his law partners determined he was taking money from the firm and some of its clients. They fired him and reported the alleged thefts to authorities. The Minnesota Supreme Court disbarred him in April.

The criminal charge said that from 1994 to this year, Margulies embezzled about $2 million through false documents, false expenses, false invoices and forged checks.

The sentence was more than the 40 years federal prosecutors had recommended for Rothstein, a disbarred lawyer who pleaded guilty to racketeering and fraud conspiracy charges in January.

He had faced up to 100 years in prison but his lawyer had asked U.S. District Judge James Cohn to give him no more than 30 years.

Rothstein, who turns 48 on Thursday, fled to Morocco as his fraud scheme collapsed in late October, apparently lured by the fact that the country has no extradition treaty with the United States. He voluntarily came back to Florida in early November and has been jailed since he surrendered to the FBI in December.

Upon his return, Rothstein cooperated with investigators unraveling his investment scheme, which prosecutors cited in asking that he be given a sentence of no more than 40 years. But Cohn tore into Rothstein for his "greed and arrogance" before handing down the tougher sentence, stressing that Rothstein had committed his fraud while serving as a licensed attorney.

Part of that fraud involved forging bogus court documents, making it especially egregious to a federal judge, Cohn said. "There can be no conduct more reviled," he said.