LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A judge sentenced Paris Hilton to 45 days in county jail Friday for violating her probation, putting the brakes on the hotel heiress' famous high life. Hilton, who parlayed her name and relentless partying into worldwide notoriety, must go to jail on June 5 and she will not be allowed any work release, furloughs, use of an alternative jail or electronic monitoring in lieu of jail, Superior Court Judge Michael T. Sauer ruled after a hearing. The judge ruled that she was in violation of the terms of her probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case. ''I'm very sorry and from now on I'm going to pay complete attention to everything. I'm sorry and I did not do it on purpose at all,'' she told the judge before he announced the sentence. She was then ordered to report to a women's jail in suburban Lynwood on the set date or face 90 days behind bars. The judge's ruling excluded her from paying to serve time in a jail of her choice, as some are allowed.

Can a patent on a legal strategy prevent a client from taking your advice? The courts may soon decide Imagine, before sitting down with your client to advise her about her legal options, having to consult the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Web site to determine whether someone else already owns the patent to the course of action you want to suggest. If that’s the case, you’ll have to pay the patent holder so your client can take your advice. But the patent holder also might refuse to sell you the license, limiting your client’s legal options. Then what? Welcome to Dennis Belcher’s world. In 2004, Belcher—a trust and estate attorney in Richmond, Va., with three decades of experience—learned that patents had been issued on certain estate planning strategies for minimizing taxes. At first, he says, “I thought it was absurd that someone could patent an estate planning strategy.” But now, “I realize how dangerous this matter is, and I follow the topic for professional protection and to keep my clients out of a patent lawsuit.” For good reason. Since issuing its first patent for a tax strategy in 2003, the Patent and Trademark Office has issued at least 52 patents covering specific tax strategies.

Rent-A-Center Inc., the nationwide rent-to-own company, has agreed to pay about 100,000 New Jersey customers a total of $109 million to settle a putative class action suit claiming the company violated the state's criminal usury statute. The company agreed to the settlement last Friday and Camden County, N.J., Superior Court Judge Ronald Freeman is expected to approve it in late May or early June, says one of the plaintiffs lawyers, Camden solo William Riback. The plaintiffs -- all of whom entered into contracts with the Plano, Texas, company between April 23, 1999, and March 16, 2007 -- will receive, on average, $800, according to the lead plaintiffs counsel, Seth Lesser of the Locks Law Firm in New York City. In a statement released after the settlement was announced on Tuesday, Rent-A-Center said it planned to finance the settlement through its regular business operations. The company has more than 3,500 outlets nationwide and reported first-quarter revenues of $755.3 million.

For the second time in about seven years, a San Francisco jury has found two major tobacco companies liable for damages related to Leslie Whiteley's habit of smoking cigarettes. In court Wednesday, a jury recommended Whiteley's husband get about $2.5 million in compensatory damages, more than the $1.7 million in compensatories attorney Madelyn Chaber helped the Whiteleys win the first time around, before a higher court ordered a retrial. Yet it's not clear how Leonard Whiteley will fare this time when it comes to punitive damages. Back in 2000, the jury handed him and his wife a total of $21.7 million -- including $20 million in punitives, $10 million each against two tobacco companies. But that was before an appeal court overturned the entire verdict in 2004, and substantially limited the plaintiffs' case going forward. In Whiteley v. Philip Morris, 117 Cal.App.4th 635, the 1st District Court of Appeal concluded the defendants could not be held liable for certain conduct during a 10-year window closed by the legislature beginning in 1988. But in the retrial, it appears that only R.J. Reynolds will face punitive damages, not co-defendant Philip Morris.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- A private investigator who worked to get condemned inmates off death row pleaded guilty Monday to forging documents to support their appeals, later declaring she did so because the death penalty is ''barbaric.'' Kathleen Culhane, 40, admitted that she forged documents to try to stop the executions of four condemned inmates since 2002. In her plea agreement, she admitted to two counts of forgery and single counts of perjury and filing false documents. State prosecutors had charged Culhane in February with 45 felony counts of forgery, filing false documents and perjury. The plea agreement asks Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Gary Ransom to sentence her to a five-year prison term. She could have faced nearly 19 years if convicted of all 45 counts.

The Supreme Court stepped into a Texas death penalty case Monday that mixes Bush administration claims of executive power with the role of international law in state court proceedings. The case accepted by the justices for argument this fall concerns the fate of Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Mexican national who was sentenced in 1994 to die for the rapes and killings of two teenage girls. The state wants to go ahead with Medellin's execution, despite a ruling from the International Court of Justice in The Hague that the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexican-born prisoners violated the 1963 Vienna Convention because they were denied legal help available to them under the treaty. The pact requires consular access for Americans detained abroad and foreigners arrested in the United States. Mexico sued the United States in the international court, alleging the prisoners' rights had been violated. Unusual for a death penalty case, the administration is siding with Medellin in asserting that the president's primacy in conducting foreign policy is being challenged.

In a major patent law development, the Supreme Court on Monday adopted a new, flexible standard that will make it easier for patents to be denied or challenged on the grounds that the invention at issue is too obvious to deserve patent protection. The unanimous ruling in KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc. could also subject existing patent-holders to fresh litigation over obviousness -- a threshold issue that is part of every patent determination. "This leaves patent litigation in a state of total disarray," says Kenneth Bass III of Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox, part of the legal team representing Teleflex, a Pennsylvania company whose patent for an automobile gas pedal assembly was challenged by KSR, a Canadian firm. Teleflex held onto its patent under a more restrictive standard for finding obviousness used by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. But the high court, in relaxing the standard Monday, ruled against Teleflex and returned the case to the Federal Circuit. "Judges are now permitted to use their own common sense rather than objective evidence or testimony," Bass says.

Two veteran jurists may find themselves reluctantly stepping in where there is a political vacuum to address inmate overcrowding. SACRAMENTO — Both are past 70, with creaky limbs, gray beards and an eye on retirement after long careers in the black robe. But like it or not, federal judges Thelton E. Henderson and Lawrence K. Karlton hold the power to help California fix a catastrophic failure: its broken prison system. It is a task neither man covets. Karlton has had heart surgery and carries a full load of cases aside from his prison work. Henderson suffers an autoimmune disorder that is attacking his muscles. He says he'd be enjoying his golden years already if not for his desire to see inmate medical care improve. "I want to retire and go fishing and hang out with my grandson," Henderson said in a recent interview. "But Larry and I feel an obligation, a duty, here." Now the judges' long-running role in California corrections is taking on new urgency. Each is poised to decide a potentially far-reaching question: whether crowding in the state's floundering prisons has become so severe that a cap on the inmate population is warranted. Hearings are set for June.

When the neighborhood dry cleaner misplaced Roy Pearson's pants, he took action. He complained. He demanded compensation. And then he sued. Man, did he sue. Two years, thousands of pages of legal documents and many hundreds of hours of investigative work later, Pearson is seeking to make Custom Cleaners pay -- would you believe more than the payroll of the entire Washington Nationals roster? He says he deserves millions for the damages he suffered by not getting his pants back, for his litigation costs, for "mental suffering, inconvenience and discomfort," for the value of the time he has spent on the lawsuit, for leasing a car every weekend for 10 years and for a replacement suit, according to court papers. Pearson is demanding $65,462,500. The original alteration work on the pants cost $10.50. By the way, Pearson is a lawyer. Okay, you probably figured that. But get this: He's a judge, too -- an administrative law judge for the District of Columbia.

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Gisela Cardonne Ely was shocked. She had just watched a videotape of a medical malpractice plaintiff, who claimed in 2004 that she was permanently paralyzed, walking down the street with the use of a cane in 2005. "This is the worst case of misrepresentation, of outright fraud, that I have ever had in 22 years," Cardonne Ely said during a March 15 hearing in the case of Wanda Davis-Johnson. "I'm telling you, Mrs. Davis, I'm looking at you in the eyes. I am dismissing your case. I have seen enough. ... I'm making a specific finding that there was a scheme to defraud the court." Lawyers on both sides are facing ethical questions about their own conduct in the case, though both sides say no Florida Bar complaints have been filed.

(AP) - LOS ANGELES-An actress shot to death at Phil Spector's hilltop castle was the last of several women victimized by the legendary music producer in a decades-long series of alcohol-fueled confrontations, a prosecutor told jurors Wednesday as they began hearing the case. The defense countered that Lana Clarkson's death was an accident, and characterized Spector as an old-fashioned romantic. Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson outlined what he called a pattern of behavior in which Spector would become exceedingly drunk, take a woman to one of his residences, refuse to let her leave and then threaten her with a gun when she refused to stay. He said Spector is someone "who, when he's confronted with the right circumstances, when he's confronted with the right situations, turns sinister and deadly."

When the American Lawyer reported last week on the lateral hiring of a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the magazine also mentioned in passing that Michael Katzke, an executive-compensation partner, had left the firm at the end of last year to start a career in social work. Huh? Leaving Wachtell for social work? It’s certainly not every day that a law-firm partner, who had counted private-equity firm Apollo Management, the NYSE, and IAC/InterActiveCorp as clients, leaves a big firm to become a social worker, especially when that firm is Wachtell, where, according to the American Lawyer, profits-per-partner in 2005 averaged about $3.8 million.

WASHINGTON — Most of the time, an obscure federal investigative unit known as the Office of Special Counsel confines itself to monitoring the activities of relatively low-level government employees, stepping in with reprimands and other routine administrative actions for such offenses as discriminating against military personnel or engaging in prohibited political activities. But the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove. The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House. First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part. "We will take the evidence where it leads us," Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. "We will not leave any stone unturned."

At the time, a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, it looked like John Walker Lindh had made a pretty good deal. Mr. Lindh, a 21-year-old from Marin County, Calif., who had served as a Taliban soldier in Afghanistan, faced charges that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life. In a plea deal, though, the government dropped its most serious accusations, including charges that Mr. Lindh had engaged in terrorism and conspired to kill Americans. Mr. Lindh instead acknowledged only that he had aided the Taliban and carried weapons. He was sentenced to 20 years, and people congratulated his lawyers for their triumph. Times change. Passions cool. Other cases offer telling contrasts. And Mr. Lindh now has a powerful and understandable case of buyer's remorse. ''He was a victim of a hysterical atmosphere post-9/11,'' Frank R. Lindh said about his son. ''Much like the country has reassessed the premises for the Iraq war, it should re-examine the premises for this sentence.''

With so many jerks working as attorneys in New York City, you'd think there would be no way to determine who's the single biggest pain in the ass. You could be wrong. The winner (or loser) is arguably Kenneth Heller. You can't count the number of crooks, shysters, or idiots among the city's 74,000 lawyers. But Kenny Heller was disbarred for simply being obnoxious. After 50 years of heaping abuse on everyone within earshot and hurling accusations of conspiracies, "favoritism," and "cronyism" at countless judges and lawyers, the 77-year-old Heller has earned this distinction: No other lawyer in the city but Heller, according to records of his disciplinary hearing, has been ousted for "obstructive and offensive behavior which did not involve fraud or deception." Heller was disbarred for basically "being an asshole," as one adversary puts it. And in their profession, the rival adds, "that takes some doing." But even though he lost his law license nearly three years ago, Heller continues to wreak havoc on the judiciary.

DNA evidence cleared its 200th person Monday, another milestone for a technology that has not only reversed convictions but has also prompted a more critical look at flaws in the justice system -- from crime lab work to the way arson cases are investigated. The details of the latest exoneration are typically nightmarish: Jerry Miller served 25 years for a rape conviction and had already been paroled when DNA tests showed he could not have been the man who attacked a woman in a Chicago parking garage. What's also troubling is how common these exonerations have become since the first reversal in 1989. It took 13 years to reach the first 100 DNA exonerations, but just five to double that number. For prosecutors and judges, as well as defense attorneys, the exonerations raise a larger question: How many others, innocent of their crimes, are behind bars?

LOS ANGELES, April 22 — An ugly conflict involving a wealthy local publisher turned even uglier Sunday as The Santa Barbara News-Press published a front-page article suggesting that the paper’s former editor had kept child pornography on his work computer, a claim that the editor promptly denounced as “malicious.” The publisher, Wendy P. McCaw, has a history of contentious relations with that editor, Jerry Roberts, who resigned his post last July over what he called her interference in news decisions. Several other editors and a columnist resigned at that time in protest, and many others have resigned or been fired over the last year because of ongoing disagreements with Ms. McCaw. Current and past employees of the paper are at odds with Ms. McCaw over their vote to unionize last fall, which she has declined to recognize. Ms. McCaw has also stirred broader tension in the community with threats of legal action against local merchants who hung signs sympathetic to the union cause, and against a journalist who wrote an unfavorable article about her in The American Journalism Review. But the latest twist took the antagonisms even further.

RENO, Nev. (AP) - A Reno man charged with the stabbing death of his estranged wife and the shooting of their divorce judge asked for the death penalty as a condition of his surrender in Mexico, court documents show. Darren Mack made the request during a series of e-mails and telephone calls to Washoe County District Attorney Richard Gammick following the crimes last June 12. The former businessman was arrested June 23 in Puerto Vallarta and now awaits an Oct. 1 trial. "I will ask for the death penalty," Mack wrote the prosecutor. A transcript of the phone calls was released for the first time Thursday in a district court motion filed by Mack's attorneys, who claim the recordings should be tossed because they were illegally recorded by Gammick. . . . [M]ack was charged with the murder of Charla Mack and the attempted murder of Family Court Judge Chuck Weller, who has returned to the bench since being shot in the chest while in his office. Mack has pleaded not guilty and recently added an insanity plea to his defense. After Mack returned to Reno, Gammick recused himself from the case because of his friendship with Mack and his involvement in his surrender. Outside prosecutors took over the case last summer and later announced they would not seek the death penalty against Mack.

Louis Robles, a nationally prominent Miami plaintiffs attorney who was charged with stealing millions of dollars from thousands of asbestos clients nationwide, has accepted a plea deal that calls for him to serve 10 years in prison and provide full restitution to his victims. The plea deal is the latest chapter in the spectacular fall of the class action and mass tort lawyer, who at one time had 40 lawyers on his staff and more than 12,000 class action clients.