The nation's highest court agreed to decide whether the 2007 state law infringed on federal immigration powers and should be struck down.

The law at issue in the case is different from the strict new Arizona immigration law passed earlier this year and criticized by President Barack Obama that requires the police to determine the immigration status of any person suspected of being in the country illegally.

But the Supreme Court's eventual decision in the case, depending on how the justices rule, could end up affecting the pending legal challenges to the new law as well.

The Obama administration last month urged the Supreme Court to rule that the 2007 law was preempted by federal immigration rules and would disrupt the careful legal balance that the U.S. Congress struck nearly 25 years ago.

The Arizona law suspends or revokes licenses to do business in the state in order to penalize employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. It also requires employers to use an electronic verification system to check the work-authorization status of employees through federal records.

The Legal Arizona Workers Act was adopted after a federal immigration overhaul law died in Congress in 2007.

Defense attorneys plan to seek the release of a Kansas doctor and his wife while they appeal their convictions on charges they conspired to profit from illegally prescribing painkillers to patients who later died.

Jurors found Dr. Stephen Schneider and his wife, Linda, guilty Thursday. Prosecutors linked their suburban Wichita clinic to 68 overdose deaths.

The Schneiders also were found guilty of unlawfully writing prescriptions and health care fraud.

No sentencing date has been set. Each faces up to a life sentence.

Linda Schneider's attorney, Kevin Byers, blames the guilty verdict on a national crackdown on doctors caught in the middle of a federal policy dispute over the drugs.

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.