Oregon's high court ruled unanimously Thursday that smokers must show actual harm to make a negligence claim against cigarette manufacturers — not just the possibility they will be harmed.

The lawsuit, brought by Patricia Lowe on behalf of about 400,000 Oregonians, argued the tobacco companies were negligent because they "knew or should have known that their cigarettes contained toxic and hazardous substances likely to cause lung cancer."

Lowe argued the industry should pay for tests to detect lung tumors at their earliest and most treatable stage.

The court ruled instead that Oregon law has long recognized that "a threat of future physical harm is not sufficient" grounds for a legal claim.

James Coon, who represents Lowe, said the ruling shows the law is trailing behind science.

"Certain toxic products put people at risk for future injury," Coon said, but "medical monitoring is a concept that ancient common law has trouble dealing with, and the court in this case applied old common law concepts without flexing them in any way."

Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor who specializes in torts, or damage claims, agreed.

"It doesn't fit in the box of traditional tort law," Tobias said. "Tort law by definition is after the fact. It aims primarily to compensate for past harm — not to prevent future harm."

But Tobias noted that Justice Martha Lee Walters, in a concurring opinion, left open the possibility the law could change "when science and medicine are able to identify harm before it becomes manifest."

Such techniques may be coming soon, said Thomas Glynn, the American Cancer Society's cancer science and trends director.

"We're probably about two years away before we can say whether we can detect lesions early enough to know what the effect will be," Glynn said.

Ben Zipursky, a Fordham University School of Law professor who specializes in product liability, said it was ironic the ruling came from the same court that recently affirmed a nearly $80 million punitive damages award against tobacco giant Philip Morris after it was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

"This is the very court that has most aggressively ruled against Philip Morris," Zipursky said.

The ruling was similar to those in state courts around the nation in similar cases, despite a move toward loosening the definition of actual harm, he said.

Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., two of the five companies named in the lawsuit, welcomed the ruling in a statement released Thursday.

The other companies were Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., Lorillard Tobacco Co. and Liggett Group Inc.

The bride was also accused of breaking a speaker in a dispute over the music at the April 5 reception. Fabiana Reyes has been sentenced in Village Court to the six days she already spent in jail. The 41-year-old also paid the band $1,500 for the damage.

Her 42-year-old husband and their 21-year-old daughter were accused of interfering with Reyes' arrest. Elmo and Helen Fernandez pleaded guilty Thursday. Police used stun guns on both during the fracas.

The daughter says the couple were legally married in 1986 but delayed their church wedding until last month.

Lawyers for defendant Brian Nichols said in court papers earlier this week that Superior Court Judge James Bodiford was quoted in a newspaper article four days after the March 11, 2005, shootings saying that he was friends with the judge killed in the rampage.

The article also said Bodiford released a statement at the time that described the death of Judge Rowland Barnes as a "brutal murder."

Nichols' lawyers questioned Bodiford's ability to be impartial, and asked that he step down.

Bodiford said at a hearing Thursday that he doesn't believe he should step down. But he said it's a good idea to let another judge review the issue.

Bodiford is serving on the Nichols case in place of a previous judge who stepped down from the case in late January after he was quoted in a magazine article saying of Nichols that "everyone in the world knows he did it."

Nichols' murder trial for the killings of four people resumes July 10.

James Battista told a judge in federal court in Brooklyn he hatched a scheme in late 2006 with another old friend of Donaghy, Thomas Martino, to pay the referee thousands of dollars for the information while Battista was "engaged in the business of sports betting."

Battista's lawyer had notified the court last week that his client wanted to go to trial rather than plead guilty to charges of defrauding the NBA, as Martino did earlier this month. But he changed his mind after prosecutors offered a last-minute deal allowing him to instead plead guilty to a lesser charge of conspiring to make illegal bets, said the lawyer, Jack McMahon.

"He's a gambler, and he bet," McMahon said. "We never really contested that."

The deal spares Donaghy from having to testify as the government's star witness at a high-profile federal trial. It also means Battista, 42, will face only 10 to 16 months in prison at sentencing on July 11. By contrast, Martino faces 12 to 18 months.

Donaghy, of Bradenton, Fla., pleaded guilty last year to charges he conspired to engage in wire fraud and transmitted betting information through interstate commerce.

The referee said he made NBA bets for four years, even wagering on games he worked. He also admitted recommending bets to high-stakes gamblers and collecting $5,000 if his picks hit.

Donaghy, 41, is scheduled to be sentenced May 22. By law, he faces up to 25 years in prison, though the term could be much lower under sentencing guidelines.

The three men attended high school together in Springfield, Pa

The South San Francisco-based biotechnology company was ordered to pay $500 million to a Southern California hospital for failing to pay royalties after City of Hope Medical Center helped manufacture some of its drugs.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court jury had awarded the hospital $300 million in actual damages and another $200 million in punitive damages for violating a contract signed in 1976.

The state's high court on Wednesday knocked out the $200 million in punitive damages but upheld the $300 million.

The closely watched case attracted 17 friends-of-the-court briefs from a variety of business interests.

It is not necessarily unlawful for an employer to adopt policies that put older workers at a disadvantage. Such policies pass muster under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act as long as they are based on “reasonable factors other than age.”

The question in a Supreme Court argument on Wednesday was whether the employer has to prove that such “reasonable factors” exist, or whether it is up to the employee who has brought a lawsuit to show that they do not.

The burden of proof makes a substantial difference in any lawsuit, although statutes rarely specify which side bears it. For federal laws against race and sex discrimination in the workplace, the Supreme Court has filled the gap by developing fairly elaborate procedures that plaintiffs and defendants must follow. But for age discrimination, the rules have remained murky, leaving the lower courts in confusion over how to handle this rapidly growing category of workplace discrimination claims.

The argument the justices heard on Wednesday was in a case brought by two dozen workers at a federal research laboratory in upstate New York. Carrying out a reduction in force, the employer, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, which is owned by the Lockheed Martin Corporation, terminated 31 employees after using a set of guidelines to evaluate workers’ skills and amenability to retraining. All but one dismissed employee was over 40, the age at which the protections of the federal age discrimination law begin to apply.

Most of the affected employees joined a lawsuit arguing that there was no justification for using an evaluation system that had such a starkly disparate impact on older workers, and that the procedure consequently violated the federal law. The plaintiffs won in a jury trial. But the judgment was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, which held that plaintiffs in such a case had the burden of showing that the policy they were challenging was unreasonable.