The Supreme Court finds itself smack in the middle of a big debate over high-speed chases.

Officers in Georgia were chasing a speeding Victor Harris in 2001 when a cruiser rammed Harris' Cadillac at roughly 90 miles-per-hour, sending him into an embankment and leaving him paralyzed.

Harris sued Deputy Timothy Scott for violating his civil rights by using excessive force. Scott said he was trying to end the chase before anybody got hurt. Two lower courts sided with Harris.

This will be the first time in more than 20 years that the high court considers constitutional limits on police use of deadly force to stop fleeing suspects.

Harris' lawyer argues something more serious than a traffic violation has to occur before such force is used. Scott's attorney counters he didn't use excessive force, and that Harris was driving recklessly.

Troutman Sanders LLP reported Monday it will open an office in Shanghai, making it the only Atlanta-based law firm with an office in mainland China, the world's fastest-growing economy.

The opening of the Shanghai office continues Troutman Sanders' expansion in the Pacific Rim, where the law firm operates a Hong Kong office that opened in 1997. Combined, the two offices will employ about 40 people.

"China's economy is booming, and many of our global clients are working in or planning to expand into this growing region," said Robert W. Webb Jr., chairman and managing partner of Troutman Sanders, during a press conference at the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

He said the expansion will help clients in the Asia-Pacific region, who need legal assistance with mergers and acquisitions, foreign direct investment, private equity and venture capital, corporate law.

Webb joined Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin last fall on the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce's trade mission to China.

"The opening of a Troutman Sanders office in Shanghai is an important step in Atlanta's ongoing efforts to strengthen business ties with China," Franklin said. "It is a great example of what can be accomplished when local business leaders work together to tell Atlanta's story, as they did during the September trip to China. We will continue that cooperation as we work to expand Atlanta's global reach."

http://www.troutmansanders.com

Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr said in a live television interview with Al Jazeera Sunday that he was "savagely tortured by the CIA when kidnapped" and taken from Milan to Egypt in 2003. Nasr, who has been at the heart of Italian judicial proceedings against US and Italian intelligence agents implicated in his alleged kidnapping, did not say in the interview whether he was tortured during his four years of Egyptian imprisonment, although he alleged that previously. He also personally revealed plans previously disclosed by his lawyer to sue former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi [JURIST news archive] for his participation in the abduction, as well as plans to seek monetary compensation from the US for his suffering.

Nasr was released from prison earlier this month. The US State Department has refused to comment on his case.

SERBIA did not commit genocide against Bosnia during the 1992-5 war, the United Nation's highest court has ruled in a landmark case - but it said that the country had violated its responsibility to prevent genocide.

Bosnia had asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ), based in The Hague, to rule on whether Serbia had committed genocide through the killing, rapes and ethnic cleansing that overtook Bosnia during the war.

It was the first time a sovereign state had been tried for genocide, outlawed in a UN convention in 1948 after the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.

A judgment in Bosnia's favour could have allowed the country to seek billions of pounds of compensation from Serbia.

Judge Rosalyn Higgins, the ICJ president, said the court concluded that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys did constitute genocide, but that other mass killings of Bosnian Muslims did not.

But she said the court ruled that the Serbian state could not be held directly responsible for genocide, so paying reparations to Bosnia would be inappropriate even though Serbia had failed to prevent genocide and punish the perpetrators.

"The court finds by 13 votes to two that Serbia has not committed genocide," she said. "The court finds that Serbia has violated the obligation to prevent genocide ... in respect of the genocide that occurred in Srebrenica."

Some 8,000 Muslims from Srebrenica and surrounding villages in eastern Bosnia were killed in July 1995. The bodies of almost half of them have been found in more than 80 mass graves nearby.

Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, both accused of genocide over Srebrenica, are still on the run.

Reacting to the ruling in Belgrade, the Serbian president, Boris Tadic, urged the country's parliament to condemn the massacre. "For all of us, the very difficult part of the verdict is that Serbia did not do all it could to prevent genocide," he told a news conference.

Fisher & Phillips LLP has hired an associate to work with the law firm’s growing immigration business practice. Jessica Cook has been practicing law for two years focusing on business immigration, labor and employment law, and general civil litigation with the firm Woods Rogers PLC in Roanoke, Virginia. Ms. Cook is a Virginia native.

Ms. Cook earned her law degree from William & Mary in 2004 and graduated summa cum laude from Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama.

Fisher & Phillips Partner David Whitlock, who heads the firm’s business immigration practice, said, “Jessica brings important business immigration law experience to the firm at a time when we are seeing a marked increase in the work our clients need. Our clients and the firm are fortunate to be able to attract someone who can immediately have an impact in a field of law that is increasingly important to business owners.”

The firm’s immigration business practice includes extensive visa work, handling both temporary and permanent visa cases, as well as advice regarding compliance with the I-9, discrimination, and document abuse provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The firm also handles litigation arising under that statute.

About Fisher & Phillips

Fisher & Phillips LLP (www.laborlawyers.com) is one of the largest national law firms in the field of labor and employment law, with 200 attorneys in 17 offices. Founded in 1943, it was one of the first U.S. law firms to concentrate its practice exclusively upon representation of employers in labor and employment matters. In addition to its Atlanta headquarters, the firm also has offices in Charlotte, Chicago, Columbia, Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Irvine, Kansas City, Las Vegas, New Jersey, New Orleans, Orlando, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, and Tampa.

http://www.laborlawyers.com

Microsoft has been ordered by a U.S. jury to pay $1.52 billion in a patent dispute over the MP3 digital file format, the technology at the heart of the digital music boom.

If upheld on appeal, it would be the largest patent judgment on record.

The ruling, in U.S. District Court in San Diego on Thursday, was a victory for Alcatel-Lucent, the networking equipment company. Its forebears include Bell Laboratories, which was involved in the development of MP3 almost two decades ago.

At issue is the way the Windows Media Player software from Microsoft plays audio files using MP3, the most common method of distributing music on the Internet. If the ruling stands, Apple and hundreds of other companies that make products that play MP3 files, including portable players, computers and software, could also face demands to pay royalties to Alcatel.

Microsoft and others have licensed MP3 - not from Alcatel- Lucent, but from a consortium led by the Fraunhofer Institute, a large German research organization that was involved in the format's development, along with Bell Labs and the French electronics company Thomson. The current case turns on two patents that Alcatel claims were developed by Bell Labs before it joined with Fraunhofer to develop MP3.

"Intellectual property is a core asset of the company," said Joan Campion, a spokeswoman for Alcatel-Lucent. "We will continue to protect and defend that asset."

Thomas Burt, the deputy general counsel of Microsoft, said the company would most likely petition the judge in the San Diego case, Rudi Brewster, to set aside or reduce the judgment. If Brewster does not, Microsoft will probably take the case to the U.S. appeals court in Washington, which hears patent cases.

Microsoft argued that one patent in question did not apply to its MP3 software and that the other was included in the Fraunhofer software that it paid to license.

Further, it argued that the damages sought by Alcatel were unreasonably high, pointing out that it paid Thomson, which represented the consortium in its dealings over the patent, a flat $16 million fee for the rights to the MP3 software.

Alcatel argued that the damages should be based on a royalty of 0.5 percent of the total value of Windows computers sold.

John Desmarais, a partner with Kirkland & Ellis who represented Alcatel, said the proposed damages were consistent with patent law. He said it was not appropriate to compare them with the $16 million Microsoft paid Thomson because the rights to the Bell Labs patents were far more valuable.

"It's like going to the supermarket and paying $1 for a bar of soap," he said. "That lets you use the soap. We were offering the equivalent of the right to make soap any way they wanted."

The jury supported Alcatel's arguments on every count except one.

It deadlocked on the question of whether Microsoft willfully infringed on the Bell Labs patents. If the jury had found that it did, Microsoft would have had to pay triple damages.

"Microsoft has been and to some degree continues to be at a competitive disadvantage, as it did not file for patents for many, many, many years," said Jack Russo, a patent lawyer with Russo & Hale in Palo Alto, California.

That makes it harder, he said, to work out deals with other large companies in which they exchange the rights to each other's patents.

Large companies like AT&T and IBM "have huge patent portfolios and that represents large and unpredictable risks for companies like Microsoft," he said. The judgment is part of a complex litigation by Alcatel to enforce claims related to Bell Labs patents. The case was initially brought against Dell and Gateway, which make computers using Microsoft software. Other trials are pending for technology related to speech recognition, user interfaces and video processing.

Microsoft has countered with a claim, filed with the International Trade Commission, that Alcatel is violating its patents related to messaging technology.

The largest award for a patent infringement case to date was the $909 million that Kodak was ordered to pay in 1990 to Polaroid for violating patents related to instant cameras.

The Supreme Court hears arguments this week in a case that will test the limits of what officers can do to stop speeding drivers in high-speed chases.

At issue before the court is whether a Georgia police officer went too far when he rammed his vehicle into a car driven by a fleeing 19-year-old -- a maneuver that left the motorist paralyzed.

Law enforcement officers around the country are anxiously watching the case, concerned that a ruling for the quadriplegic driver would put them in legal jeopardy for split-second decisions at crime scenes.

Meanwhile, civil liberties advocates and critics of police chases are concerned that a ruling for the officer in the case would give law enforcement the green light to use more aggressive tactics on the roads.

Law enforcement agencies should "authorize high-speed pursuits only when necessary," said Karen Blum, a law professor at Suffolk University in Boston, who filed a brief in the case for the National Police Accountability Project. "The tactics employed by (the officer in this case) present serious issues of police accountability and raise questions about police tactics."

The chase occurred in 2001 in Coweta County, Ga., a community about 30 miles southwest of Atlanta. Victor Harris, 19 at the time, was clocked driving 73 mph in a 55-mph zone. A county sheriff flashed his lights and turned on his siren, but Harris hit the gas and sped away. Deputy Timothy Scott joined the pursuit, which lasted for six minutes and covered almost 9 miles.

A trial court found that Harris drove between 70 and 90 mph, ran through two red lights, and bumped Scott's vehicle once. Nevertheless, Harris still used his turn indicators when passing other cars on the largely vacant roads.

Scott radioed a supervisor and got permission to use a "precision intervention technique" -- a maneuver for hitting another car that causes it to spin and then stop. But the deputy ultimately abandoned the technique because he and Harris were driving too fast on a wet, two-lane highway.

Instead, Scott hit Harris' car with his push bumper -- a move that caused the vehicle to careen down an embankment. Harris, who was not wearing a seat belt, was paralyzed from the neck down.

Harris filed a lawsuit against Scott, alleging violation of his rights under the Fourth Amendment's guarantees against unreasonable seizures and excessive force.

A federal district court in Georgia ruled that the deputy could be held liable in civil court for using deadly force without having probable cause to believe the teenager had committed a serious crime or posed a threat to others. In December 2005, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision.

Scott appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, which hears oral arguments in the case on Monday.

The deputy was acting "reasonably," argued his attorney, Philip Savrin, because a "fleeing car can be a deadly weapon" and Scott "believed that his actions avoided a greater risk of serious injury or death."

Savrin added: "Scott personally observed Harris driving recklessly and dangerously at extremely high speeds, through red lights and on the wrong side of the road. Scott properly recognized that Harris was a continuing danger to the public, and he acted reasonably to defuse the danger."

The Supreme Court's ruling in the case is expected to set new benchmarks for when and how law enforcement officers can chase suspects and use their vehicles to stop them.

The issue is murky because the previous two rulings on the use of deadly force were roughly two decades ago -- and those did not deal with car chases.

For instance, in 1985, the Supreme Court said deadly force can be used when a suspect threatens an officer with a weapon or there is probable cause to believe the suspect has committed a crime causing serious physical harm.

In 1989, the high court said judges deciding whether the use of deadly force is reasonable must weigh the underlying crime involved, the immediate threat a suspect poses and whether the suspect is actively evading arrest.

Harris' attorney, Craig Jones, argued that Harris' only offense at the beginning of the police chase was speeding -- a relatively minor crime that did not warrant such a risky pursuit.

Jones warned that a ruling against his client would give law enforcement officers carte blanche to recklessly and "knowingly apply deadly force in circumstances when no life is in immediate danger in order to seize a fleeing traffic offender."