"We are extremely gratified by the jury's verdict, as we have always believed that the plaintiffs' claims were without merit," said Kevin Kennedy, JDSU's President and Chief Executive Officer. "We will continue focusing our full attention on developing innovative products and delivering on the significant potential of our business model to create shareholder value."

The Company noted that while the jury's decision in this case is a significant positive milestone, it continues to defend itself in the securities class action and related litigation.

LaRue, who used to work at a management consulting firm, is among the 42 million workers who contributed to a 401(k) retirement plan. At issue in LaRue's case are the limits to lawsuits under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. It regulates private-sector retirement plans holding over $5.5 trillion in assets, including $2 trillion in an estimated quarter of a million 401(k) plans across the country.

Unlike traditional pension plans, participants in 401(k) plans — named after a section in tax law — do not know how much money they will receive in retirement. It depends on how well their chosen investments have performed.

ERISA was designed to safeguard pension fund money from misappropriation. The 1974 law followed the failure of some companies to pay promised pensions and extensive looting of some pension and welfare funds at companies and labor unions.

Class-action suits filed under the law over the past decade have targeted Enron, WorldCom and other major companies tainted by scandal.

From a legal standpoint, it is less clear what action an individual account holder can take against a retirement plan when the conduct at issue is less than criminal.

LaRue says that in 2000 and 2001 he requested changes in his investment allocations in mutual funds that were available to participants in his company's 401(k) plan. He says the requests were not honored.

"I wanted to sell stocks and move to cash because I thought the market would head down. I was right," LaRue said in a telephone interview. "I didn't find out that the plan had not executed my transactions until 10 months later. They had a substandard reporting system. I left the firm. I asked them again to make the change, and they still didn't do it. I don't know why."

The Bush administration, siding with LaRue, says an appeals court ruling against him would leave participants in "the most common form of pension plan who have been injured by a breach of fiduciary duty without a meaningful remedy from any court."

LaRue sued in 2004, saying he had tried to avoid going to court and instead sought to reach a settlement with his former employers. He was unsuccessful, as it turned out.

"We had already been through one lawsuit over stock in the company, which I won," said LaRue. "Even though I prevailed, it was not pleasant. I didn't want to go through it again."

Business groups assign a different motive to the long delay in filing the second suit, saying LaRue was waiting to see how the market performed. If the value of his investment went up, he made money. If it went down, he would head to court.

LaRue, according to the American Council of Life Insurers, was "squarely in the proverbial catbird seat. ... He could not lose. ... Granting LaRue relief in this case would encourage other plan participants to do the same."

In papers in the case, the council said denying LaRue the right to sue for damages would ensure that a plan participant who claims his investment directions were not followed would act promptly, seeking a court order if necessary.

When ERISA was passed, decisions on where to invest money were out of workers' hands. Under 401(k) and other types of plans, employees make the choice.

"If they're going to shift the responsibility for a plan from a company to the individual, then they should listen to our instructions," LaRue said.

ERISA pre-empts state laws relating to employee benefit plans, meaning LaRue cannot use them to sue, and therein lies his problem.

Besides protecting workers, ERISA was aimed at encouraging employers to set up retirement plans and in doing so, Congress limited the right to sue. Just where the line is drawn is the question in LaRue's suit, though the Supreme Court in past decisions on ERISA has drawn the line in favor of employers.

The business world says allowing cases like LaRue's could lead to a wave of suits without merit.

"There is a cost associated with any expansion of remedies," the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said in a filing in the Supreme Court supporting LaRue's former employer.

Opening up plan administrators to liability will increase the cost of running ERISA plans, result in fewer being established or reduce the level of benefits, the business group says.

The case is LaRue v. DeWolff, Boberg & Associates Inc; and DeWolff, Boberg & Associates Inc., Employees' Savings Plan, 06-856.

Failure to submit to the searches, which can last an hour, disqualifies applicants from assistance.

The 10-year-old program was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of six single parents who were seeking assistance. The welfare applicants argued that the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches, protects them from the home visits.

"When the investigator conducts the home inspection, no part of the home is off-limits," they said.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding the program, said the Supreme Court in 1971 allowed social workers to visit homes in New York to determine eligibility. The appeals court, in a 2-1 decision, said the visits do not even constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment in part because people are free to turn away the investigators.

In dissent, however, Judge Raymond Fisher said it was unlawful for an investigator from the district attorney's office to go "walking through the applicant's home in search of physical evidence of ineligibility that could lead to criminal prosecution either for welfare fraud or other crimes unrelated to the welfare application."

The local government said the high court should not step in.

"No applicant has been prosecuted for welfare fraud based upon anything observed or discovered during a home visit that contradicted information provided by the applicant," the county said in its brief for the Supreme Court.

Eight appeals court judges voted to have the full San Francisco-based court hear the case. Seven of those judges called the program "an attack on the poor."

Teen Ranch denies that it forced the young people to attend religious services, saying that it offers alternatives such as academic study time, writing letters home and recreational time in a gymnasium.

In asking the justices to take the case, lawyers for Teen Ranch say the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati incorrectly expanded a 2003 Supreme Court ruling to cover Teen Ranch. In the 4-year-old ruling, the Supreme Court barred state scholarships for students studying to enter the clergy.

The appeals court decision enables bureaucrats "to discriminate against religious organizations at will," lawyers for Teen Ranch said in asking the justices to take the case.

Under grilling from lawmakers and attack by lawsuits alleging Bush authorized the illegal wiretapping of Americans, the White House has invoked a legal defense known as the "state secrets" doctrine — a claim that the president has inherent and unchecked power to shield national security information from disclosure, either to plaintiffs in court or to congressional overseers.

The principle was established a half-century ago when, ruling in a wrongful-death case brought by the widows of civilians killed in a military plane crash, the Supreme Court upheld the Air Force's refusal to provide an accident report to the plaintiffs. The government contended releasing the document would compromise information about a secret mission and intelligence equipment.

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, believes the White House has gone too far in invoking state secrets to halt civil lawsuits.

"We have the authority to define the state secrets doctrine," Specter says. "I don't think that the simple assertion of state secrets ought to be the end of the matter."

Specter, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and others are working on legislation that would direct federal judges to review the president's state secrets claims and allow cases with merit to go forward.

Practices among judges vary. Some accept state secrets claims outright, dismissing cases on the government's word. Others read the privileged information and decide for themselves, but almost invariably side with the government, according to legal scholars.

The draft legislation is modeled on procedures used in criminal cases that involve classified information. The Classified Information Protection Act lets judges review classified information a criminal defendant wants to use in his defense, but which could compromise national security if it were released publicly. The law allows the court to delete classified passages, substitute summaries of the information, or substitute a statement of facts that the classified information would prove.

The measure could become part of the Senate's new eavesdropping law, expected to be voted on in early December, the aides said.

In another challenge to Bush's position on classified material, a federal judge in Virginia last week ordered the government to give trial prosecutors, defense lawyers and her clerk security clearances to review classified material in a terrorism case. Defense lawyers say the material will show the government failed to turn over evidence obtained by illegally monitoring their client's communications, and they want a new trial. The government says the information is protected by the state secrets privilege.

And in a case in Oregon, a U.S. district court judge is set to decide whether the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act trumps presidential claims of secrecy.

Adopted after the Watergate scandal, FISA dictates when the government must get permission from a secret court to monitor electronic communications inside the United States. It also allows people who believe they were spied on illegally to sue the government for damages and to request materials that would prove the surveillance. If the attorney general says disclosure would harm national security, a district court may review the classified materials privately to determine if the surveillance was illegal.

That civil liability provision of FISA, however, comes up hard against the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush secretly authorized the spy agency to intercept international communications coming in and out of the United States that were believed to involve foreign terrorist organizations. It did so without going through the FISA court, claiming the Constitution and Congress' authorization for the use of military force after the terrorist attacks were all the authority the president needed to undertake the program.

Privacy and civil liberties groups say the warrantless surveillance violates FISA's prohibition on domestic surveillance without court orders. But for someone to sue the government for FISA violations, they must prove they were directly injured by the government's action. That is nearly impossible because the government will not disclose its targets or methods.

One organization, however, believes it can demonstrate it has standing to sue because of an accidental document release in 2004. That February, the Bush administration froze the assets of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Muslim charity the United Nations Security Council alleges is associated with al-Qaida. In preparation for a legal proceeding on the terrorist designation in August, the Treasury Department inadvertently gave the foundation's lawyers and directors a top secret document dated May 24, 2004.

The document appeared to be a government summary of phone conversations it monitored between foundation lawyers and directors, according to a Washington Post reporter who received a copy from the foundation.

The FBI took the document from the Washington Post and Al Haramain in October 2004.

Fourteen months later, The New York Times revealed the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. That is when the foundation's lawyers realized what the top secret document was: proof the organization had been targeted for warrantless electronic surveillance under TSP. They believe that proves standing, unique among plaintiffs in dozens of surveillance cases filed across the country.

The government asserts the states secrets privilege and refuses to release the document or confirm its contents. In its first crack at the case in 2006, the federal court in Oregon partially agreed. It said the document was rightfully protected by state secrets, but the foundation's lawyers could describe what they remembered about it to establish standing in their lawsuit.

The government appealed that decision to the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco, which last week upheld its state secrets claim. But it did not dismiss the case. Instead, it directed the Oregon court to tackle one question it had sidestepped: whether FISA overrides the common law state secrets privilege.

Whatever the lower court decides, its decision will almost certainly be appealed to the Supreme Court, legal experts and attorneys on the case say. The high court is unlikely to be friendly to a challenge to the state secrets doctrine. In October it unanimously declined to hear a CIA torture allegation case that the Bush administration wanted dismissed on secrecy grounds. And in 2005, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the state secrets doctrine in an espionage contract case.