But when Albrecht's parents learned years later that they had buried him without a brain, they filed a lawsuit that raises ethical, moral and religious questions about the treatment of one's body after death.

The case, to be argued Wednesday before the Ohio Supreme Court, has drawn international attention for its ramifications to coroners, crime investigators, EMTs, funeral directors and followers of religions that espouse the importance of burying the whole body.

The Albrechts argue that they had a right under the Ohio Constitution to their son's brain, and a right under the U.S. Constitution to reclaim the brain before it was destroyed. The lawsuit is a class action suit against coroners and commissioners in 87 of Ohio's 88 counties covering cases dating to 1991.

Under Ohio law, brains, hearts and other body parts and fluids removed during an autopsy are classified as medical waste, which generally means they are incinerated after use.

"What this case really comes down to is, for the convenience of the government, are we Ohioans, we humans, supposed to give up our most basic rights to the human remains of our loved ones?" said John Metz, an attorney who brought the Albrechts' suit. "I am absolutely amazed to have to be standing in front of the highest court in our state to defend against such a socialist view."

Defenders of the coroners, including the Ohio State Coroners Association, Ohio State Medical Association and the National Association of Medical Examiners, contend that establishing property rights for families to the organs, tissue, blood and other fluids extracted during an autopsy could jeopardize timely autopsies and jeopardize criminal evidence.

"The longer you wait to perform an autopsy, the more evidence and information you lose," said Elizabeth Mason, an assistant Clermont County prosecutor leading the county coroners' defense.

Brains are particularly difficult to reunite with a body in time for burial, because it takes three to 14 days to prepare them for examination.

Mason anticipates an onslaught of litigation against counties if the Albrechts prevail. Relatives are often upset about autopsies taking place, and may begin negotiating with coroners about what to do with body parts. But relatives may not always agree with each other.

"I call that the 'Chicken-Little-Sky-Is-Falling' defense," Metz said. "We recognize you, as the state, have a right to our loved one's body to do an autopsy. But once you're done, all you have to do is pick up the phone and talk to these people, and say, 'I'm done with your child's heart.'"

Metz and co-counsel Patrick Perotti have been taken to task before the court for making a legal question too emotional. Perotti's briefs have contained references to Achilles' slaying of Hector in The Iliad, the drowning of Shakespeare's Ophelia and poet Walt Whitman's "I Sing The Body Electric."

Lawyers for the coroners at one point tried and failed to get one particularly verbose submission — which traced the history of death from ancient to modern times — stricken from the record.

"We don't dispute that it is a cultural norm for us to accord that kind of respect for our dead," Mason said. "But that doesn't mean that when they went out to get Hector's body back, they scraped up every drop of blood to make sure they got everything."

In a brief, the Medical Examiners Association said material from a dead body is almost always lost. Bodies lose fluids at accident scenes and parts of some bodies are never found, the group said.

It argued that material taken by coroners is being singled out unfairly in this case.

Christopher Albrecht, 30, died in December 2001 when he suddenly plunged his vehicle into a pond.

The coroner determined that an epileptic seizure prompted his accident, but that his death was caused by drowning.

According to the autopsy, a portion of his brain had been removed during his life as part of a surgical procedure related to his epilepsy.

Abdus-Shahid M.S. Ali's lawsuit against prison guards was based on allegations of harassment and mistreatment. But the Supreme Court's decision yesterday that he is barred from suing rests on an ambiguous federal statute that has confounded the courts and sharply divided the justices.

It involves the word "any."

Ali's lawsuit alleging a missing Koran and prayer rug is barred under the Federal Tort Claims Act, the court said in a 5 to 4 ruling, because the law includes prison guards among those immune from suit.

The confusion in the courts comes because the immunity is mentioned in a section of the law that blocks lawsuits against the government over the "loss of goods, merchandise or other property" detained by customs or excise officers. The law then adds "or any other law enforcement officer."

"Congress could not have chosen a more all-encompassing phrase than 'any other law enforcement officer' " to show that it intended broad immunity, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. Therefore, the law "forecloses lawsuits against the United States for the unlawful detention of property by 'any' not just 'some,' law enforcement officers."

Thomas was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the dissent for the rest of the court. He said the court was wrong not to look at the context of the statute -- that it related to customs rather than prisons -- and said the implications of the decision were great.

"The seizure of property by an officer raises serious concerns for the liberty of our people and the Act should not be read to permit appropriation of property without a remedy in tort by language so obscure and indirect," Kennedy wrote.

Ali said in lower-court proceedings that the Koran, prayer rug and other religious materials -- worth about $177 -- went missing during his transfer from a federal penitentiary in Atlanta to Big Sandy prison in Kentucky. He alleged it was one of a number of incidents of mistreatment and harassment of Muslim prisoners.

But a district court said the lawsuit was barred by federal law, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit agreed. It is one of six circuits that have read the law to cover all law enforcement officers, in the same manner as Thomas and the court majority. Five circuits have read the law to limit the protection to officers performing customs or excise functions.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer agreed with Kennedy's dissent and added his own to reinforce his view of the importance of context.

"When I call out to my wife, 'There isn't any butter,' I do not mean, 'There isn't any butter in town,' " Breyer wrote. "The context makes clear to her that I am talking about the contents of our refrigerator.

"That is to say, it is context, not a dictionary, that sets the boundaries of time, place and circumstances within which words such as 'any' will apply," Breyer wrote.

The court's decision extends the law to "tens of thousands of officers performing unrelated tasks" to those covered by the statute, Breyer said.

Enron's demise wiped out thousands of jobs, more than $60 billion in market value and more than $2 billion in pension plans.

Tuesday's turndown for the Enron investors came without comment in a routine Supreme Court list of cases the justices had decided not to hear.

The chances that Enron shareholders can recover some money dimmed a week ago with the Supreme Court's decision against investors in a separate suit. It alleged that two suppliers doing business with a cable TV company engaged in securities fraud.

That suit was politically sensitive for the Bush administration because of its potential to affect the Enron case. The administration sided with the business community against investors, despite the recommendation of the Securities and Exchange Commission to side with the investors. It was left to attorneys general from 30 states to support shareholders in the case against the cable TV suppliers.

The justices ruled that the investors in Charter Communications Inc. did not have the right to sue because they did not rely on the deceptive acts of the suppliers.

The same principle could apply to the Enron case, where investors relied on Enron's glowing description of its business, but were arguably unaware of any deceptive conduct by the investment banks.

Lawyers for Enron investors say the circumstances in the two cases are not comparable.

In the Enron suit, stockholders are accusing Wall Street investment banks of colluding with the energy company to hide its losses.

To date, Enron plaintiffs have settled for $7.3 billion from several financial institutions including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

Enron stockholders are seeking more than $30 billion from Merrill Lynch & Co., Credit Suisse First Boston and Barclays Bank PLC.

The investment banks, say Enron investors, schemed with the energy company, scheming with Enron by entering into partnerships and transactions that enabled the energy company to take liabilities off its books, recording revenue from the deals when it was actually incurring debt.

Now that the Supreme Court has rejected the case, "I think that the chances of succeeding on a scheme liability theory are nearly zero; the resolution of this Enron case was made clear by the decision" last week against investors in the cable TV suppliers suit, said attorney Greg Markel, who represents corporate clients in securities fraud lawsuits.

Last March, the appeals court in New Orleans reversed a decision by U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon in Houston, who had said Enron shareholders could sue as a class.

The issue of certifying a class is a critical one. Once the courts allow huge numbers of investors to pursue a securities fraud lawsuit, the defendants almost always settle rather than exposing their corporations to potentially catastrophic liability.

The appeals court decision in the Enron case meant that shareholders and investors could not pool their resources to sue as a group. Lawyers for Enron investors estimate the class size at over 1 million shareholders.

Enron Corp., once the nation's seventh-largest company, crumbled into bankruptcy in December 2001. The failure became a symbol of the corporate scandals that rocked Wall Street early this decade.

The justices agreed to review claims by Vicky Crawford, who was fired in 2003 after more than 30 years as an employee of the school system for Nashville, Tenn., and Davidson County.

Months earlier, investigators interviewed Crawford about the school district's director of employee relations, Gene Hughes, and Crawford told them Hughes had sexually harassed her and other employees.

The investigation found Hughes had acted inappropriately, but did not recommend that he been disciplined.

Instead, Crawford learned she faced charges of irregularities in her job as payroll coordinator, and she was fired. Crawford then filed a federal lawsuit claiming she had been dismissed in retaliation for alleging harassment by Hughes.

A U.S. district judge and a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit. The courts said the anti-retaliation provision of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not apply to Crawford because she didn't raise harassment claims on her own but merely responded to investigators' questions.

The Bush administration is supporting Crawford. "Internal investigations are an integral aspect of Title VII and there is no reason to leave cooperating witnesses unprotected," said Solicitor General Paul Clement.

The justices also will review a separate case involving age-discrimination claims filed by former workers at the Knolls Atomic Power Lab.

The tobacco industry is trying to head off a wave of state-based challenges regarding the light cigarettes, even as it is appealing a federal judge's order to stop marketing cigarettes as "low tar," "light," "ultra light" or "mild" because they mislead consumers.

The issue before the justices is whether state laws against unfair marketing practices may be used in suits against the tobacco companies or whether federal law bars such lawsuits. The Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act says states can't impose any requirements on the advertising or promotion of cigarettes.

A federal judge initially threw out a suit filed by three Maine residents against Altria Group Inc. and its Philip Morris USA Inc. subsidiary that alleged the advertising of light cigarettes was unfair and deceptive.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, however, reinstated the suit.

The Maine plaintiffs said they smoked Marlboro Lights, made by Philip Morris, for at least 15 years. They claim the company marketed the cigarettes as "light" and having "lowered tar and nicotine" despite knowing that those statements were false, in violation of Maine's Unfair Trade Practices Act.

The company has research, the plaintiffs say, that shows it knew that smokers of the light cigarettes took deeper puffs and used other techniques to ensure they received as much nicotine as they would have gotten from regular cigarettes.

Philip Morris said the lawsuit was properly dismissed by the federal judge and called on the Supreme Court to resolve a conflict between appeals courts over these sorts of lawsuits. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans last year dismissed a similar suit.

In the government's landmark case against tobacco companies, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler said the companies "distorted the truth about low tar and light cigarettes so as to discourage smokers from quitting."

That case is on appeal with the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

A separate federal lawsuit filed by smokers is pending in New York. The class-action suit alleges tobacco companies violated federal racketeering laws by promoting light cigarettes as lower-risk alternatives to regular cigarettes even though their internal documents showed they knew the risks were about the same. The class may consist of as many as 60 million people, lawyers say.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York is considering whether the lawsuit can proceed as a class action or whether smokers must file suit individually.

The basics of the claims against the companies are similar in all the lawsuits: The companies knew that smokers may compensate for the lower tar and nicotine yields by taking deeper puffs, holding the smoke in their lungs longer or smoking more cigarettes.

The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company filed a brief in support of its chief rival, saying the financial stakes in the case are enormous.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, also backing Altria, said the appeals court ruling could extend well beyond cigarette labels to product liability lawsuits against many industries.

But in the three-paragraph statement, Maynard said "it has now become an issue of public perception and public confidence in the courts."

Maynard helped form a 3-2 majority in November that overturned a multimillion-dollar judgment against Richmond, Va.-based Massey that another company, Harman Mining, and its president, Hugh Caperton, had won in a contract dispute. Caperton had asked Maynard to step down from the case before the high court reconsiders that ruling. With interest, the damages are worth $76.3 million.

Bruce Stanley, a lawyer for Caperton, declined to comment Friday until after discussing the development with his client.

A Massey spokesman did not immediately respond to a message requesting comment.

The photos of Maynard and Massey Energy chief Don Blankenship together in Monaco in 2006 were included in a revised court motion filed Monday.

Both men have said they were on separate vacations, and that each paid his own way. Maynard has also said his friendship with Blankenship has not affected his impartiality on the court.

In one picture, the men are sitting side-by-side, smiling over empty glasses at a cafe along the Riviera as the Mediterranean sun sets behind them. In others, they are posing by the seaside. Ten other photos were filed under seal, and depict the men with two female companions, the motion said.

The court must now appoint a replacement, likely a circuit judge or retired jurist, to sit in Maynard's place.

Harman Mining is also challenging the impartiality of another justice, Brent Benjamin, arguing he should step down because Blankenship spent millions of dollars on an ad campaign attacking another justice on the court that helped to boost Benjamin into office in 2004.

That recusal petition was filed late Thursday. Benjamin has not yet responded, court spokeswoman Jennifer Bundy said Friday.

State court rules require judicial officers to disqualify themselves from proceedings if their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned," or if they have "a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party or a party's lawyer."

Caperton contends that he and his company were driven into bankruptcy by unfair and deceptive dealings by Massey, the country's fourth-largest coal producer. A Boone County jury awarded Harman and Caperton $50 million in damages, which later swelled to $76.3 million with interest.

In the 3-2 ruling in November, though, three justices including Maynard and Benjamin agreed that whatever its merits, the case should not have been pursued in West Virginia courts.

On Thursday, a settlement was announced in Washington in which Massey agreed to pay a $20 million fine over allegations it routinely polluted hundreds of streams and waterways in West Virginia and Kentucky with sediment-filled waste water and coal slurry.

Under the agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Massey also will invest millions of dollars for pollution control improvements at its 44 mines and coal facilities in the two states and in Virginia, the EPA and Justice Department said.