_ Ruled for employers who want to force unionized workers to pursue their age discrimination claims through arbitration instead of a federal lawsuit. The court, in a 5-4 decision, said an arbitration agreement negotiated between an employer and a union that strips them of their option to take complaints to court is binding on workers. The dissenting justices said the high court in the past ruled that unions cannot bargain away employees' federal forum rights in discrimination cases.

_ Said the federal government should pay federally appointed lawyers for working on state clemency requests for death row inmates. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati had said that the law does not allow federal public defenders to be paid for working on state clemency requests. The high court disagreed and reversed that decision on a 7-2 vote.

_ Ruled that the government may consider cost in deciding whether to order power plants to undertake environmental upgrades that would protect fish. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said that the Clean Water Act does not allow cost to be used when deciding what technology would best minimize environmental impacts. But Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a 6-3 majority, said even the appeals court and environmentalists "concede that some form of cost-benefit analysis is permitted."

The order by Connecticut Superior Court Judge Arthur Hiller, issued Monday and made public Tuesday, prohibits them from selling homes or moving money, and marks the first time their assets have been frozen.

"This is an important step," said David Golub, a lawyer representing the town of Fairfield, Connecticut, in a lawsuit against Madoff and the so-called feeder funds run by Tremont Group Holdings, Maxam Capital Management and Fairfield Greenwich Group.

The town's pension funds charged in a lawsuit that the funds "knew -- or willfully refused to know -- that Madoff's investment returns were not actually produced by his purported split-strike conversion strategy."

Separately, a judge in New York denied an appeal by Madoff's brother, Peter, to lift a freeze on his assets in a civil lawsuit. Peter Madoff had reached an agreement with U.S. authorities in December on an asset freeze, according to court papers.

Massachusetts' top securities regulator charged hedge fund firm Fairfield Greenwich Group with fraud for allegedly lying to investors about confessed swindler Bernard Madoff's phony management business.

The action on Wednesday marks the first charges against one of Madoff's feeder funds, which funneled billions of dollars into the disgraced Wall Street legend's long-running Ponzi scheme.

William Galvin, Massachusetts' secretary of state, accused Fairfield Greenwich, a prominent hedge fund firm in Connecticut, of failing to check how Madoff generated the strong and steady returns he said he made year after year.

"The allegations against Fairfield in this complaint outline a total disregard for such (fiduciary) responsibility which helped the Madoff scheme to stay afloat for so long," Galvin said in a statement.

Galvin wants Fairfield Greenwich to return the money that Massachusetts investors lost in the scheme and return the performance fees they paid the firm. He is also seeking an administrative fine against Fairfield.

Fairfield Greenwich's Sentry Funds had placed about $7.2 billion, or 95 percent of its assets, with Madoff, whose fraud appears to have totaled about $65 billion.

The three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld a tax court ruling that threw out the deduction claimed by Stephen Jones for material he collected as lead defense counsel in McVeigh's trial for the 1995 bombing that killed 168 people.

Jones told The Associated Press on Monday that the courts agreed the value of the gift is not deductible, but the appellate court rejected what Jones characterized as "ill-tempered language" in the tax court's opinion of his case.

Jones said the Internal Revenue Service treated him and his wife, Sherrel, with "a cavalier, condescending, unprofessional attitude and behavior from beginning to end."

He said he asked that the agency's Oklahoma City office be disqualified from the case because some IRS workers there had experienced losses in the bombing, which injured hundreds of people and damaged areas of downtown.

A spokesman for the IRS in Dallas, Clay Sanford, declined comment on the case because of federal disclosure regulations that prohibit public discussion of individual tax matters.

An appraiser hired by Jones valued the materials at $294,877, and Jones and his wife claimed a tax deduction for that amount. He said he received the deduction for four years before the IRS rejected it and sent Jones a notice of tax deficiency for $14,785.

In upholding the tax court ruling, the Denver-based appellate court said the size of the deduction Jones could claim was limited to the amount he had paid or invested, which was none.

Jones gave the prosecution and defense materials to the University of Texas, which he attended as an undergraduate. The archive includes transcripts, FBI reports, correspondence, videotapes and other materials.

In a one-sentence order, the court left in place a ruling by the Oregon Supreme Court in favor of Mayola Williams. The state court has repeatedly upheld a verdict against Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris USA in a fraud trial in 1999.

The judgment has grown to more than $155 million with interest, and Williams stands to collect between $60 million and $65 million, before taxes and payments to her lawyers, said Robert Peck, her Washington-based lawyer.

The justices heard arguments in the case in December, but said Tuesday that they are not passing judgment on the legal issues that were presented. Instead, it is as if the court had declined to hear the case at all.

Philip Morris had argued that the award should be thrown out and a new trial ordered because of flaws in the instructions given jurors before their deliberations.

Business interests had once hoped the high court would use the case to set firm limits on the award of punitive damages, intended to punish a defendant for its behavior and deter a repeat offense.

Peck said the court has signaled a willingness to allow large awards in certain circumstances. "I think we can take from this long tale that if the behavior is sufficiently reprehensible, then larger awards are merited," Peck said.

In a unanimous opinion, the high court refused to reverse the conviction of Michael Rivera, who was found guilty of first degree murder in the shooting death of 16-year-old Marcus Lee and sentenced to 85 years in prison.

Rivera's lawyer wanted to use one of his peremptory challenges on a female juror candidate, but a state judge refused to let him do it. The woman, Deloris Gomez, a business office supervisor at Cook County Hospital's outpatient orthopedic clinic, went on to become the jury forewoman.

The Illinois Supreme Court said she should have been dismissed, but that the error was harmless. Rivera's lawyers argued that the seating of an illegal juror should have required an automatic reversal.

"A state trial court's good faith but erroneous denial of a criminal defendant's peremptory challenge, we hold, does not require automatic reversal of the defendant's conviction, provided that all persons seated on the jury are qualified and unbiased," said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court.

The frauds involved so-called "straw buyers" — people who received a fee for agreeing to use their name and credit information to obtain mortgages on dozens of properties. Such scams have proliferated around the country in recent years, although rarely in such a high-profile location as Wednesday's bust.

The Hamptons have long been a getaway for the rich and famous, with celebrities and wealthy New Yorkers spending exorbitant amounts of money on mansions and summer rentals. Prosecutors said some of the homes that were rented to vacationers were fraudulently purchased through the mortgage fraud scheme.

The straw buyers either filled out phony loan applications claiming inflated or nonexistent incomes — in one case claiming a salary of nearly $450,000 a year — or said they were employed by corporations controlled by some of the schemers, Spota said.

One of these companies was identified as Arena Studios, Inc. a Manhattan business that at one time provided dominatrix services, the prosecutor said. Another source of straw buyers was a company called Maximum Restraint Films.