The court said Monday it will hear arguments in the case again in a special session on Sept. 9. The justices said they want lawyers to address whether the court should overturn its earlier rulings on limiting corporate and union contributions in federal elections.

Citizens United, a conservative not-for-profit group, wanted to air ads for the movie in Democratic primary states and also make the film available to cable subscribers on demand without complying with federal campaign finance law.

But lower courts have said the movie looked and sounded like a long campaign ad, and therefore should be regulated like one.

At the time of "Hillary: The Movie," the New York senator was competing with Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. She is now secretary of state in the Obama administration.

The court's composition will be different by the time it rehears the case. Justice David Souter plans to retire this month, and Obama has nominated Sonia Sotomayor, a judge from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to replace him.

The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide and make it harder to prove discrimination when there is no evidence it was intentional.

New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.

The ruling could give Sotomayor's critics fresh ammunition two weeks before her Senate confirmation hearing. Conservatives say it shows she is a judicial activist who lets her own feelings color her decisions. On the other hand, liberal allies say her stance in the case demonstrates her restraint and unwillingness to go beyond established precedents.

Coincidentally, the court may have given a boost to calls for quick action on her nomination.

The court said it will return Sept. 9 to hear a second round of arguments in a campaign finance case, and with Justice David Souter retiring there would be only eight justices unless Sotomayor has been confirmed by then.

In Monday's ruling, Justice Anthony Kennedy said, "Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions." He was joined in the majority by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Madoff "discarded me like road kill," Siegman said.

Even before the one-time financier was sentenced to 150 years in prison, Siegman, 65, hobbled out of the federal courthouse and into the media scrum that has followed the secretive money manager from his Upper East Side apartment seven months ago to this sentencing Monday.

There, anger toward Madoff appeared to have shifted more to the regulators that many believe failed to stop the massive fraud. Victims and nearby protesters took the government to task for not preventing Madoff's Ponzi scheme. U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said estimated losses for investors were more than $13 billion, but he said that was conservative.

The crush of TV cameras and reporters spilled out into the street in front of oncoming traffic as New York City police tried to hem in the crowd.

Siegman, surrounded by cameras, said she lost 40 years of savings and now scavenges for food. Appearing frail and supporting herself on a walker, she began to feel unwell while speaking with reporters. The questions kept coming even as she ate a cookie to raise her blood sugar.

Defense attorneys had sought 12 years, while prosecutors wanted the maximum. The federal probation department had recommended 50 years. Chin called the fraud "staggering" and noted that it spanned more than 20 years. He says "the breach of trust was massive."

The 71-year-old former Nasdaq chairman pleaded guilty to securities fraud and other charges in March and has been jailed since.

Convicted Ponzi-scheme operator Bernard Madoff will learn Monday morning whether he'll spend the rest of his life behind bars for running a decades-long swindle that bilked thousands of investors out of billions of dollars.

Madoff, who admitted in March to orchestrating one of the largest and longest-running white-collar frauds in recent memory, is set to be sentenced at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan at 10 a.m. EDT Monday.

Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan have asked for the statutory maximum of 150 years or a sentence that will effectively guarantee the 71-year-old Madoff spends the rest of his life in prison.

"He engaged in wholesale fraud for more than a generation; his so-called 'investment advisory' business was a fraud; his frauds affected thousands of investors in the United States and worldwide; and he repeatedly lied under oath and filed false documents to conceal his fraud," Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mark Litt and Lisa Baroni said in a court documents last week. "The scope, duration and nature of Madoff's crimes render him exceptionally deserving of the maximum punishment allowed by law."

Ira Sorkin, Madoff's lawyer, has asked for a sentence of as little as 12 years in prison, citing Madoff's potential life expectancy of 13 years. In the alternative, he's asked for a sentence of 15 years to 20 years in prison.

On March 12, Madoff was ordered directly to jail after pleading guilty to 11 criminal charges, including money laundering and multiple counts of fraud, in a Ponzi scheme that prosecutors claim stretched back to the 1980s. Madoff himself has said the fraud began in 1990s during a recession.

The justices overturned part of a ruling by a U.S. appeals court that entirely blocked the state office from investigating or enforcing the fair lending laws against national banks because they are subject instead to federal regulation.

In the court's main split opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia concluded the state attorney general cannot issue subpoenas, but can bring judicial enforcement actions.

In 2005, Eliot Spitzer, then the state attorney general, began investigating possible racial discrimination in mortgage lending. He sent letters of inquiry to mortgage lenders, including banks such as Wells Fargo, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup.

The probe was prompted by data that Spitzer said appeared to show a significantly higher percentage of high-interest home mortgage loans issued to black and Hispanic borrowers than to white borrowers.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a federal agency that oversees nationally chartered banks, sued to enjoin the probe on the grounds it fell outside state jurisdiction. A consortium of national banks also sued.