The Supreme Court ended its term Monday with a high-profile ruling that violent video games are protected by the First Amendment, but a bigger technology decision could be looming. The court agreed to hear a case next term about when the government can put GPS devices on people's cars — which could produce one of the court's biggest privacy rulings in years. The GPS issue is important in its own right — the government can learn a lot ...

Conrad Black, the press baron accused of looting his Hollinger International media empire, began his current trial in Chicago with at least one thought on his mind. "The prosecutors will soon, finally, have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the guilt of completely innocent people," he wrote recently. "They will fail, and justice will be done." Well, maybe. The strength of the government's case against him and his co-defendants aside, "beyond a reasonable doubt," the level of proof required to ...

Our marriages often provoke us to throw the china and utter the unforgivables. The context is usually personal, not political, but either way, passions run high. In May, barring some unforeseen procedural hindrance, gay couples will wed for the first time ever in the U.S. They will have that opportunity by order of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled last week that it is unconstitutional to deny them marriage licenses. Gays and lesbians across the country celebrated. Hundreds of ...

The Supreme Court's decision to throw out a sex-discrimination suit by a large group of female Wal-Mart employees may look like a mere procedural decision about the rules for class-action lawsuits. But it is in fact a much bigger deal: it significantly shifts power from workers to big employers. The ruling on Monday in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes puts a halt to a class-action lawsuit that could ultimately have included as many as 1.5 million current and former ...

There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God." That confession of faith, the shahada, is professed by all Muslims, be they the 700 million Sunnis who dominate the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia or the 90 million Shi'ites who rule Iran and form majorities in Lebanon, Bahrain and Iraq. To the shahada, however, the Shi'ites add, "And Ali is the Friend of God." Those additional words in praise of Ali, whom the Shi'ites passionately ...

A week after former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn posted a $1 million cash bail and a $5 million bond, he was moved from temporary lodgings on lower Broadway to a large townhouse in Tribeca. Unlike a large apartment building, a townhouse has no doorman, but for DSK, there is no need. Keeping watch over him will be multiple "armed monitors" courtesy of security firm Stroz Friedberg. By the terms of Strauss-Kahn's bail order, filed with the New ...

France is having its Anita Hill moment. When the law professor testified before a Senate committee in 1991 that her former boss Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, he denied everything and was elevated to the Supreme Court. But the hearings were a turning point. Women suddenly said that the Mad Men style of behavior they had put up with for so long at work — the leering, the inappropriate touching, the sexual banter — was not ...

An e-mail has been making the rounds among some of my physician colleagues. "I am shocked that information about the prescriptions I write for my patients is being sold to drug companies for marketing purposes," begins the missive. "This is a violation of my privacy as a physician and an intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship!" The note implores doctors to support laws that restrict the sale of physician-prescribing information to drug companies and to sign up ...

When Marcia Hams and Susan Shepherd cut into their wedding cake at city hall in Cambridge, Mass., on May 17, 2004, after becoming the first same-sex couple in the U.S. to complete a state-sanctioned marriage application, they probably hoped their union would open the floodgates for gay couples across the country. But instead, it became a high-water mark for same-sex marriage as the acrimonious debate over the issue raged on--a moment equaled only by a California Supreme Court's ruling in ...

This week the Supreme Court let stand a ruling that ultimately could affect as many as one-third of all Americans — anyone in a stepfamily. But you'll probably never realize it from any news reports on the ruling. The case comes out of Washington State. Sue Carvin and Page Britain were lesbians living together since 1989. Their baby, L., was born in 1995, using an at-home artificial insemination kit and some sperm donated from their gay friend. ...