The high court wrote, "we can conceive of no way to draw a principled line permitting drug testing only student athletes."

"If we were to allow random drug testing here, what prevents school districts from either later drug testing students participating in any extracurricular activities, as federal courts now allow, or testing the entire student population?" Justice Richard Sanders wrote for the court's plurality. Joining him were Chief Justice Gerry Alexander and Justices Susan Owens and Tom Chambers.

Two families with high school students sued the district. Wahkiakum County Superior Court Judge Douglas Goelz ruled in 2006 that testing students was reasonable after less-intrusive methods failed to address the drug threat. The case was appealed directly to the state Supreme Court.

Messages left with the school district and with the lawyer for the school district were not immediately returned.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington represented the parents. ACLU spokesman Doug Honig said the case was precedent-setting for the state, and "as a result of this ruling we don't expect to see other districts pursuing suspicionless testing programs."

However, the nine-member court was split on whether the plurality ruling was too sweeping. There were three separate concurrences, and at least one justice said random suspicionless drug testing would be OK under "carefully defined circumstances."

The sticking point between the ruling by Sanders and a concurrence written by Justice Barbara Madsen was over a "special needs exception" as in federal law, which would allow random searches in some circumstances.

Sanders' ruling says there is no need to create that type of exception in Washington law.

"Simply passing muster under the federal constitution does not ensure the survival of the school district's policy under our state constitution," Sanders wrote.

"In the context of randomly drug testing student athletes, we see no reason to invent such a broad exception to the warrant requirement as such an alleged exception cannot be found in the common law," he wrote.

Consequently, a Republican administration finds itself aligned against the most popular tenet of social conservatism: gun rights, which enjoy much wider agreement than do opposition to abortion or gay marriage. Promises in two presidential campaigns are being abandoned, and Bush finds himself to the left of even Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

The 1976 D.C. statute prohibiting ownership of all functional firearms was called unconstitutional a year ago in an opinion by Senior Judge Laurence Silberman, a conservative who has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for 22 years. It was assumed that Bush would fight Mayor Adrian Fenty's appeal.

The president and his senior staff were stunned to learn, on the day it was issued, that Clement's petition called on the high court to return the case to the appeals court. The solicitor general argued that Silberman's opinion supporting individual gun rights was so broad that it would endanger federal gun control laws such as the bar on owning machine guns. The president could have ordered a revised brief by Clement.

But facing congressional Democratic pressure to keep his hands off the Justice Department, Bush did not act.

Cheney did join 55 senators and 250 House members in signing a brief supporting the Silberman ruling. Although this unprecedented vice presidential intervention was widely interpreted as a dramatic breakaway from the White House, longtime associates could not believe that Cheney would defy the president. In fact, he did not. Bush approved what Cheney did in his constitutional role as president of the Senate.

That has not lessened puzzlement over Clement, a 41-year-old conservative Washington lawyer who clerked for Silberman and later for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Clement has tried to explain his course to the White House by claiming that he feared Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court's current swing vote, would join a liberal majority on gun rights if forced to rule on Silberman's opinion.

The more plausible explanation for Clement's stance is that he could not resist opposition to individual gun rights by career lawyers in the Justice Department's Criminal Division (who clashed with the Office of Legal Counsel in a heated internal struggle). Newly installed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, a neophyte at Justice, was unaware of the conflict and learned about Clement's position only after it had been locked in.

A majority of both houses in the Democratic-controlled Congress are on record as being against the District's gun prohibition. So are 31 states, with only five (New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and Hawaii) in support. Sen. Barack Obama has weighed in against the D.C. law, asserting that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms -- not just collective authority to form militias.

This popular support for gun rights is not reflected by an advantage in the oral arguments to take place Tuesday. Former solicitor general Walter Dellinger, an old hand at arguing before the Supreme Court, will make the case for the gun prohibition. Opposing counsel Alan Gura, making his first appearance before the high court, does not have the confidence of gun-ownership advocates (who tried to replace him with former solicitor general Ted Olson).

The cause needs help from Clement during his 15-minute oral argument, but it won't get it if he reiterates his written brief. The word was passed in government circles this week that Clement would amend his position when he actually faces the justices -- which would be an odd ending to bizarre behavior by the Justice Department.

Mukasey will ask the justices on March 25 to reinstate the conviction of would-be millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam on a charge that an appeals court threw out, Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said.

The 66-year-old Mukasey is a former federal judge who presided over high-profile terrorism trials in New York.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned just one of the nine counts on which Ressam was convicted for plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport around Jan. 1, 2000. The charge in question is carrying explosives during the commission of another serious crime.

The appeals court said the law required prosecutors to show the explosives were carried "in relation to" the felony, which in this case was lying on a Customs form.

Mukasey will urge the justices to reverse the appeals court, in part because the ruling could make it harder to prosecute terrorists. The government argues that the law means a defendant must be carrying the explosives at the same time as he commits another crime.

Ressam's lawyer, Tom Hillier, said Mukasey's involvement "doesn't change the question before the court."

"Same case, same facts," said Hillier, the federal public defender in Seattle. "Attorney General Mukasey has had a distinguished career as a federal judge and before that as a prosecutor. He'll do a great job. He knows his stuff."

Reno was on the winning end of the case in which she argued, in support of Maryland, that police can order passengers and drivers to get out of vehicles during traffic stops.

Griffin Bell did not fare as well when he took on a controversial case in the Carter administration. Bell argued unsuccessfully against letting an endangered fish, the tiny snail darter, stop a federal dam project.

Only about one-third of the court's cases this term have been decided. The most important cases often are announced in the final days in late June.

But of the 18 majority opinions handed down so far, eight justices have written at least two each; Justice Samuel Alito has written none.

Newer justices often take a little longer to churn out their work, but Alito's first opinion last term came in December for a unanimous court.

Alito's paltry output could be a result of nothing more than the wait for dissenters to file their opinions.

The more contentious rulings typically come later. Justices need time to read drafts of their colleagues' work and make changes based on the input. It is not known what opinions Alito is writing, but most of the easy cases from the term's early days have been decided.

This all could change next week when the justices return to the bench and are likely to issue decisions.

Alito has not been completely silent. He wrote dissenting opinions in two cases involving a judge's discretion to be lenient toward defendants in drug cases.

Law offices of Brodsky & Smith, LLC announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of all persons who purchased the common stock of MF Global, LTD. ("MF Global" or the "Company") (NYSE: MF) in its Initial Public Offering on July 19, 2007 and on the open market through February 28, 2008 (the "Class Period"). The class action lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The Complaint alleges that defendants violated federal securities laws by issuing a series of material misrepresentations to the market, thereby artificially inflating the price of MF Global.

No class has yet been certified in the above action. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. If you are a MF Global shareholder you have certain rights. To be a member of the class you need not take any action at this time, and you may retain counsel of your choice. If you want to discuss your legal rights, you may e-mail or call the law office of Brodsky & Smith, LLC who will, without obligation or cost to you, attempt to answer your questions. You may contact Evan J. Smith, Esquire or Marc L. Ackerman, Esquire at Brodsky & Smith, LLC, Two Bala Plaza, Suite 602, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004, by e-mail at clients@brodsky-smith.com, or by calling toll free 877-LEGAL-90.

In a new Bush administration initiative that Paulson said is not about "finding excuses and scapegoats," a presidential working group set up in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash is calling for a series of actions designed to avert the kind of chilling housing and credit crunches that are threatening to throw the nation into recession — if it isn't there already.

"The objective here is to get the balance right — regulation needs to catch up with innovation and help restore investor confidence but not go so far as to create new problems, make our markets less efficient or cut off credit to those who need it," said Paulson, who heads the working group.

One recommendation calls for federal and state regulators to strengthen oversight of mortgage lenders and another urges state financial regulators to implement strong nationwide licensing standards for mortgage brokers, according to the group's report, released Thursday.

The Federal Constitutional Court said Thursday it has ruled that the state is within its rights to cite "the protection of family order against the damaging effects of incest ... and the avoidance of serious genetic illnesses" in outlawing incest.

The ruling followed a complaint by a 31-year-old man from eastern Germany, who has been identified only as Patrick S. He received a 2 1/2 year prison sentence for incest in 2005 but has been free pending the supreme court ruling.

His sister, Susan K., who is now in her early 20s, was placed under the supervision of social services.

The man had been given up for adoption at age 4 and met his birth-mother for the first time in 2000, at which point he also first met his sister. He and his sister then had four children.

The man's lawyer has argued that there is no reason why two people who love each other should not be allowed to live together — purely because they are siblings.

However, the constitutional court ruled that sexual relations between siblings "do not affect them exclusively, but also can have an effect on family and society, and have consequences for children who arise from the relationship."

The court said one of the judges who considered the case dissented in the Feb. 26 ruling, arguing that the ban was disproportionate.