Authorities said the firm made an estimated $250 million over two decades by filing such legal actions.

Seven people, including three former partners at the firm, have pleaded guilty in the case. Lazar was the first to be sentenced. He also was fined $600,000.

U.S. District Judge John F. Walter said he was outraged that a former attorney could "flatly lie" as part of legal proceedings.

The lack of respect for the legal system amounted to the "absolute height of arrogance," the judge said, adding that he would not have hesitated to send Lazar to prison if not for his age and deteriorating health. Lazar could have faced up to 18 years in federal prison.

Wearing a dark blue suit with a knitted sweater draped across his shoulders, presumably for extra warmth, the frail-sounding Lazar said he understood Walter's concerns but felt he had already been punished for his wrongdoing.

"I have been under investigation for seven or eight years and it has been seven or eight years of hard time," Lazar said. "That's all I can say."

With the judge's consent, Lazar remained seated throughout the hearing.

Lazar pleaded guilty in October to obstruction of justice, subscribing to a false tax return and making a false declaration to the court.

Walter said he spent the weekend thinking about a suitable sentence for Lazar, worrying that a noncustodial term would send a message that wealthy defendants can buy their way out of confinement.

But ultimately, Walter said Lazar's infirmity made him unsuitable for prison.

Lazar thanked the judge after the sentencing.

"Good luck to you," the judge replied.

Lazar then left the courtroom and was greeted by members of his family.

Lazar has already repaid $1.5 million of the money prosecutors said he was paid as part of the scheme.

The law firm, previously known as Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman, paid $11.3 million in kickbacks to people who became plaintiffs in class-action lawsuits against companies such as AT&T Inc., Lucent, WorldCom, Microsoft Corp. and Prudential Insurance, prosecutors said.

The tactic allowed the firm's attorneys to be among the first to file litigation and secure the lucrative position as lead plaintiffs' counsel, according to court documents.

The firm dominated the industry in securities class-action lawsuits, which involve shareholders who claim they suffered losses because executives misled them about a company's financial condition.

The three former partners who have pleaded guilty are William Lerach, Steven Schulman and David Bershad.

Lerach's high-profile legal victories included a $7 billion judgment against now-defunct energy giant Enron Corp. He pleaded guilty as part of a deal to conspiracy to obstruct justice and make false statements.

Schulman pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy charge. He agreed to forfeit $1.85 million to the government and to pay a $250,000 fine.

Bershad pleaded guilty to conspiracy and agreed to cooperate with the government.

Firm co-founder Melvyn Weiss has pleaded not guilty to one count each of conspiracy, mail fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice in a revised indictment.

The Milberg Weiss firm itself has pleaded not guilty to two counts of conspiracy and one count each of obstruction of justice and making false statements.

"The evidence is overwhelming that when voters do not have access to technology that notifies them of ballot errors, many more ballots are left uncounted," said Meredith Bell-Platts, a voting-rights attorney with the ACLU.

Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland and has more than 1 million registered voters, plans to send all paper ballots from precincts to a central location to be scanned and counted.

The ACLU alleges that the optical-scan system and centralized vote tabulation would not give voters notice of ballot errors — such as voting for two candidates for one office.

Opponents of the system say scanning should be done immediately at the precinct level to alert voters to such errors and allow them to correct invalid ballots.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen O'Malley set a deadline of Feb. 4 for the Ohio secretary of state and the county elections board to respond to the ACLU and a hearing for the next day on the request for a preliminary injunction.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's top elections official, said the thrust of the ACLU's request would rule out the use of absentee ballots because those voters wouldn't know whether they had made an error or get a chance to correct it.

Brunner said it would difficult to go back to the prior touch-screen voting system in time for the primary because of staff training and system testing requirements.

"The ACLU is too late," she said.

Messages seeking comment were left for Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason, whose office handles legal matters for the elections board. Jane Platten, director of the Cuyahoga County elections board, referred requests for comment to Mason's office.

When the lawsuit was filed, Mason said he would challenge its contentions. Mason said the optical-scan system is permitted under the Help America Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002 in response to the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Democratic leaders of a House science subcommittee alleged yesterday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency manipulated scientific research into the potential danger posed by a toxic gas emitted in trailers still housing tens of thousands of survivors of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

FEMA "ignored, hid and manipulated government research on the potential impact of long-term exposure to formaldehyde" on Katrina and Rita victims now living in the FEMA trailers, the congressmen wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, whose department includes FEMA.

Reps. Brad Miller (N.C.) and Nick Lampson (Tex.) cited agency documents given to Congress in alleging that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- generally considered a repository of nonpartisan scientific expertise -- was "complicit in giving FEMA precisely what they wanted" to suppress the adverse health effects.

The lawmakers said the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry ignored one of its experts, Christopher T. De Rosa, after he informed FEMA there was no "safe level" of long-term exposure. They said FEMA bypassed that opinion and "shopped" the agency for its desired recommendation to study only short-term exposure.

"Any level of exposure to formaldehyde may pose a cancer risk, regardless of duration," De Rosa wrote in a Feb. 27, 2007, letter to a FEMA lawyer, recently obtained by a House Science and Technology investigative subcommittee that Miller chairs. "Failure to communicate this issue is possibly misleading and a threat to public health."

De Rosa wrote the letter after learning that the CDC bypassed his office to produce a Feb. 1, 2007, report for FEMA that did not consider long-term exposure risks, contradicting his recommendation to the agency in June 2006.

"Honest scientific studies don't start with the conclusion, and then work backwards from there," Miller said.

FEMA said the health agency's report last February did not address long-term health effects but rather concerned ways to avoid toxic exposure to formaldehyde. "FEMA did not suppress or inappropriately influence any report," agency spokesman James McIntyre said.

More than 40,000 trailers are still being used by families displaced by Katrina in August 2005 and Rita weeks later. FEMA announced last July that it would test occupied trailers, after congressional investigators disclosed that the agency had suppressed warnings for more than a year from its field workers about health problems experienced by Katrina survivors.

Tests on 500 trailers, finally begun last month, are being performed by CDC, the lawmakers noted. "The Committee is concerned about the independence and scientific integrity of any indoor air testing for formaldehyde levels in these trailers done under the auspices of FEMA," Miller and Samson wrote.

"For those who are too poor to live elsewhere, FEMA's position remains as it was in 2006: there are no possible adverse health effects that can't be cured by opening the windows," they added.

Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Clinton and a one-time aide to Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, has been in the House of Representatives for all seven of Bush's State of the Union speeches.

On three occasions he was the only justice to cross the street from the court to the Capitol. In addition, Breyer also was the only justice at Bush's first speech to Congress in 2001, a couple months after the justices voted 5-4 to stop Florida's ballot recount and ensure Bush's presidency. Breyer had opposed halting the recount.

Breyer was joined Monday by Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy.

Roberts and Alito, Bush's two court appointees, have attended all three speeches since joining the court.

The last time Breyer missed the State of the Union was in 2000, in Clinton's last year in office. He had the flu.

That speech was the only time in recent memory when no justice was present, other than in 1986, when the speech was rescheduled because of the explosion of the Challenger shuttle.

Justices typically have said little about why they do or don't attend the speech. One exception is Justice Antonin Scalia, who hasn't gone in at least nine years.

Scalia, commenting in 2000, said the speech has become increasingly partisan — a potential problem for justices who customarily refrain from applauding anything even remotely political.

"One side will clap for this, and then the other side will clap for that," Scalia said. "And you know, we sit there like bumps on a log."

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Put the second woman on the Supreme Court together with the first woman on Great Britain's highest court and what do you get? A conversation about bathrooms, of course.

"Everybody's got a bathroom story, haven't they?" said Lady Brenda Hale, the first woman Law Lord, at a recent forum at Georgetown University's law school with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Ginsburg recalled that when she joined the court in 1993, court workers altered the woman's bathroom adjacent to the room where the justices put on their robes to make it as large as the men's room. But it took a letter from advice columnist Dear Abby to get the court to change its tradition and open public women's bathrooms before 9 a.m., she said.

Sandra Day O'Connor, named to the Supreme Court in 1981, "had taken care of most of the irrationalities before I got there," Ginsburg said.

Hale told her own tale of being informed there was no women's restroom at the Privy Council, the final appeals court for the British empire.

The trailblazing judges also discussed recent changes in England that include renaming the high court the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, moving the court from Parliament to its own building and instituting mandatory retirement at 75.

Hale, also known as the Baroness Hale of Richmond, said the age limit was a response to colleagues "who went on long beyond it was sensible for them to go on, but were not sufficiently incompetent to be removed."

Ginsburg noted with relief that there is no retirement age for U.S. judges. She will turn 75 in March.

The court upheld Spanish telecom company Telefonica SA's right to refuse to hand over information that would identify who had used peer-to-peer file-sharing tool KaZaA to distribute copyrighted material owned by Promusicae, a Spanish nonprofit group of film and music producers.

EU law did not require governments to protect copyright by forcing companies to disclose personal data in civil legal actions, the Luxembourg-based court ruled.

They could draft national rules to change this but they will then have to balance the right to privacy against property rights and "cannot however affect the requirements of the protection of personal data," a court statement said.

The ruling "raises the question of the need to reconcile the requirements of the protection of different fundamental rights, namely the right to respect for private life on the one hand and the rights to protection of property and to an effective remedy on the other," the court said.

A Spanish court had asked the European court to give guidance on the case after Promusicae complained of Telefonica's refusal to hand over details identifying the people who used the computer addresses linked to the illegal downloads.

Telefonica claimed Spanish law only allows them to share personal data for criminal prosecutions or matters of public security and national defense.

Music industry group, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, said record labels would push on with their campaign against Internet piracy and the court had confirmed the need to have effective tools to tackle illegal copying.

"Copyright theft on the internet is the single biggest obstacle to the growth of the music business today," said IFPI head John Kennedy.

"The judgment means that music rights owners can still take civil actions to enforce their rights, and it has sent out a clear signal that member states have to get the right balance between privacy and enforcement of intellectual property rights and that intellectual property rights can neither be ignored nor neglected."

The European branch of the Motion Picture Association — which represents American film studios such as Universal, Walt Disney, Paramount and others — welcomed the ruling as balanced because the court had upheld copyright as a fundamental right alongside the right to privacy.

The MPA of America claimed in a 2005 study that U.S. film industry lost $6.1 billion to piracy worldwide that year, most of it outside the United States.

Millions of people use file sharing sites to download both legal and illegal copies of albums, films, TV episodes, computer programs and even books.

The music industry has largely shunned file sharing, preferring digital tools to restrict how songs can be copied and played.

U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson was expected to rule Monday on whether to send federal marshals to close the encampment and evict its residents. Larson took an extensive tour of the park last month to see the conditions firsthand.

At a hearing earlier this month, Larson indicated he would shutter the park unless its owner, Harvey Duro Sr., presented a detailed plan to fix electricity, water and sewage systems by Monday's hearing. The judge could order the park closed immediately or he could give residents several weeks or months to find other housing.

But closing the park, which is in the fertile Coachella Valley about 130 miles southeast of Los Angeles, would flood an already overwhelmed affordable housing market in surrounding Riverside County.

The county currently has a 40,000-person waiting list for subsidized or low-income housing, with no new units expected before 2010. The only other affordable apartments are at least 90 minutes away, according to papers filed Friday.

Cheap housing is key for the 4,000 migrant workers who live in the Desert Mobile Home Park during peak harvest season and for the region's economy. The migrants, who make as little as $15,000 annually, pick some of the nearly $1 billion worth of table grapes, dates, chili peppers and other crops that the region yields each year.

Last summer, a fire displaced 120 residents, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs paid for an independent inspection that launched the government's latest drive to shut the park down.

That inspection found sewage wastewater several inches deep, dead rodents, swarms of flies and animal feces at the encampment, as well as inadequate drinking water, a dangerous electrical system, severe overcrowding and fire hazards, according to court papers.