When Jillian T. Weiss made the change from male to female back in 1998, she found it hard to get a job as a lawyer.

"People were unwilling to have me work with them when they could tell when I was transitioning," Weiss said.

Only able to get a job as a legal secretary, Weiss had to "go back" and work her way up. After getting a doctorate degree, Weiss now is an assistant professor of law and society at Ramapo College. Weiss says how she expresses her gender is a nonfactor with her students and co-workers.

Weiss said her experience beginning nearly a decade ago is similar to what many transgender people deal with in the work force. The state, however, is looking to end this type of workplace discrimination.

Beginning today, New Jersey becomes the sixth state to explicitly prohibit transgender discrimination. The change to the state's Law Against Discrimination adds "gender identity and expression" to the list of categories already protected against discrimination involving employment, along with public accommodation, contracts, housing, credit and union membership.

"What this is going to do is provide a push in for people so they can start to get jobs," said Weiss, who holds workshops with corporations and small businesses to teach workplace diversity. "Even though there will continue to be unemployment, they will find that it is going to relieve some of the frustrations they have that they can't get jobs at all."

New Jersey's law was signed in December but didn't take effect for 180 days. It was enacted with wide support in the Legislature, 69-5 with six abstentions in the Assembly, and 31-5 and 33-3 in its two votes in the Senate.

Several other states give transgender people certain protections under sex or disability discriminations laws, and four more states — Colorado, Iowa, Oregon and Vermont — have transgender anti-discrimination laws coming into effect this year.

"It's just the right thing to do," said Sen. Ellen Karcher, D-Monmouth, one of the law's primary sponsors. "We're all human beings, and I just thought we should give them the rights they deserved."

Barbara Casbar Siperstein, director of Gender Rights Advocacy Association of New Jersey, said making the law "black and white" presents an opportunity to "educate people and make them think."

"One of the things I think that we all want, as people, is respect," Casbar Siperstein said.

Violators could face stiff penalties. The law allows for a pre-trial investigation done by the state Division on Civil Rights or a civil court hearing, and anything from a cease-and-desist order to compensation for the harmed party could be issued. Fines also could be handed out, from $10,000 for a first offense to $50,000 for multiple offenses.

The current expansion adds to the oldest civil rights statute in the country, which was passed in 1945, said Frank Vespa-Papaleo, director at the state Division on Civil Rights.

The original law prohibited discrimination of race, nationality and ethnicity in employment, but was rarely enforced. The section in the state Constitution outlawing discrimination in education and military service was the first to explicitly state such a ban when it was drafted in 1947.

Vespa-Papaleo added that the state's civil rights law is among the broadest in the country.

"New Jersey has a very bold and generally positive outlook on protecting the rights of the people in our community regardless of their background," Vespa-Papaleo said.

"They (jurors) didn't review any documents, transcripts or exhibits, which were considerable," Osio said. "They took the shortcut and rushed to judgment without proper deliberation. We are concerned that the prosecutor's very inflammatory closing argument and mischaracterization of the evidence was very prejudicial."

Prosecutors contended that Osio embezzled the money from a trust fund he was hired to set up for Alicia Waters and her husband, Henry, in 2002. She discovered the money missing after her husband's death, authorities said. She died in 2005 at age 92.

Osio was convicted of one count each of grand theft, theft from an elder, forgery and perjury.

He remains free on bail but could face up to six years and eight months in state prison when he is sentenced next month.

A federal judge Friday requested that the U.S. attorney prosecute prominent Mississippi attorney Richard F. Scruggs and his law firm for criminal contempt in a Hurricane Katrina insurance dispute.

U.S. District Judge William M. Acker Jr. said if the federal prosecutor in Birmingham declines the court's request, Acker will appoint another attorney to handle the prosecution.

Acker ruled that Scruggs "willfully violated" a Dec. 8, 2006 preliminary injunction that required him to deliver "all documents" about State Farm Insurance Co. that whistleblowers Cori and Kerri Rigsby secretly copied after Katrina. Acker's ruling came in a suit by E.A. Renfroe and Co. Inc., a claims adjusting firm that fired the Rigsbys after finding out they had taken internal documents. Renfroe and Co. worked for State Farm, and the sisters were heavily involved in processing claims for the insurance giant.

"It is undisputed that Scruggs had in his possession the exact documents that fell within the scope of the injunction and that were and are the whole subject of the controversy," the judge wrote in his order. Instead of complying, Scruggs promptly sent the documents to Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood's office, Acker says, "for the calculated purpose of ensuring noncompliance with or avoidance" of the injunction.

He said Scruggs's motive seems clear from the undisputed facts. "Even after Hood `voluntarily' sent the documents to counsel for Renfroe at Scruggs's request, Scruggs wrote to Hood requesting another copy of the same documents for himself and ostensibly for the Scruggs Katrina Group," the judge wrote.

He called Scruggs' action a "brazen disregard" of the court's order, calling it "precisely the type of conduct that criminal contempt sanctions were designed to address." Richard Scruggs called the judge's actions "bizarre." "Our firm fully cooperated with the court's injunction. We did what was asked of us and the information that we turned over was strong evidence of fraud by the insurance industry," Richard Scruggs told The Associated Press Friday evening. "We're going to vigorouly oppose it and we are willing to accept what consequences this Alabama judge might impose for complying with his own injunction," he said. Zack Scruggs, his son and law partner in Oxford, Miss. said an appeal of Acker's ruling is possible.

The elder Scruggs had argued that he did not violate the injunction because the injunction, as he interpreted it, contained an express "carve-out for law enforcement," Acker noted. But the judge wrote: "To read the preliminary injunction to permit Scruggs to deliver the documents to Hood rather than to counsel for Renfroe is such a strained construction and so contrary to the injunction's clear terms as to lack any credibility whatsoever."

The Rigsbys, from Ocean Springs, Miss., have admitted copying thousands of pages of records to back up their allegations that State Farm wrongly denied claims after Katrina. The sisters gave the documents to law enforcement agents and Scruggs, who signed them each to a $150,000-a-year consulting contract. The sisters say they made about 15,000 copies -- three sets of 5,000 separate records.

Scruggs, a highly successful plaintiffs' lawyer who is the brother-in-law of U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., is suing State Farm on behalf of hundreds of Mississippi residents.

"Mr. Nifong did not act as a minister of justice, but as a minister of injustice," state bar prosecutor Douglas Brocker said Saturday morning.

Brocker told the disciplinary hearing committee that as Nifong investigated allegations that a stripper was raped at a March 2006 party thrown by Duke's lacrosse team, he charged "forward toward condemnation and injustice," weaving a "web of deception that has continued up through this hearing."

The bar charged Nifong, a prosecutor in Durham County for his entire three-decade legal career, with breaking several rules of professional conduct, including lying to both the court and bar investigators and withholding critical DNA test results from the players' defense attorneys.

Those DNA tests found genetic material from several males in the accuser's underwear and body, but none from any lacrosse player. Even though he was aware of those results, Nifong still pressed ahead with the case and won indictments against Dave Evans, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty.

State prosecutors later concluded the three players were "innocent" victims of a rogue prosecutor's "tragic rush to accuse."

Nifong acknowledged Friday he was likely to be punished by the disciplinary committee for maybe getting "carried away a little bit" when talking publicly about the case. He said he regretted some of his statements, including a confident proclamation that he wouldn't allow Durham to become known for "a bunch of lacrosse players from Duke raping a black girl."

Brocker pounded on such comments Saturday, saying Nifong had to have known he was making improper comments to reporters.

"They (were) clearly going to cause public condemnation of anybody who was charged," Brocker said.

Brocker also focused on when Nifong learned about the full extent of the DNA test results and when he shared that information with the defense.

Nifong gave defense attorneys an initial report on the DNA testing in May 2006 that said private lab DNA Security Inc. had been unable to find a conclusive match between the accuser and any lacrosse players.

But lab director Brian Meehan testified this week that he told Nifong as early as April 10, 2006 _ a week before Seligmann and Finnerty were indicted _ about the more detailed test results.

"The positive results were the truth," Brocker said. "They just weren't the whole truth."

Nifong testified that when he gave the defense the initial report, he "believed at the time that I had given them everything."

Nifong tearfully said Friday he would resign as district attorney, stunning his staff in Durham and his own attorneys. They had insisted for weeks their client had no plans to leave the office he was elected to for the first time in November.

"It has become increasingly apparent, during the course of this week, in some ways that it might not have been before, that my presence as the district attorney in Durham is not furthering the cause of justice," Nifong said, adding later: "My community has suffered enough."

Even if he is disbarred, Nifong's troubles aren't over _ the players' attorneys have pledged to seek criminal contempt charges next week in Durham.

The private, nonprofit Partnership was started in Decmeber 2000 after Attorney General Michael Moore was successful in persuading a Jackson County chancery judge to start the program. To do so, the judge diverted to the Partnership $20 million per year of the $110 million the state receives annually from the tobacco companies.

Gov. Haley Barbour and Treasurer Tate Reeves filed suit, claiming the judge's decision to appropriate the money to the Partnership was unconstitutional. The settlement funds, they argued, were state money and only the Legislature can spend the funds.

Carlson wrote "...it is the Legislature's solemn duty and responsibility to appropriate these funds and not that of the judiciary."  The ruling was not unexpected.

Justice Oliver Diaz of Biloxi was the only member of the high court to dissent. He said the issue had been settled in 2000 and it was too late for Barbour and Reeves to object.

Barbour said the ruling pointed out "a local judge and the attorney general have no power to give taxpayer money to a private charity."

"It's a shame it look a long, drawn-out lawsuit to stop this illegal and unconstitutional diversion of taxpayer money."

Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Arthur Eaves said Barbour, a former Washington lobbyist who represented tobacco companies, is continuing "to put the interest of his Washington cronies above those of Mississippi children."

Moore said Thursday the issue had never been about constitutionality for Barbour. He said that to appease Barbour, the Legislature voted in 2006 to appropriate the funds to the Partnership, but the governor vetoed the bill.

The vote was a devastating blow to efforts to reverse a 2003 court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

An amendment now can't reach voters before 2010. That would happen only with a successful new petition drive and the backing of 50 lawmakers in two consecutive sittings of the 200-seat Legislature - including the one that just rejected the ballot measure.

Such a scenario appeared increasingly unlikely, but opponents of gay marriage vowed to press on.