Ira Isaacs readily admits he produced and sold movies depicting bestiality and sexual activity involving feces and urine. The judge warned potential jurors that the hours of fetish videos included violence against women, and many of them said they don't want to serve because watching would make them sick to their stomachs.

"It's the most extreme material that's ever been put on trial. I don't know of anything more disgusting," said Roger Jon Diamond — Isaacs' own defense attorney.

The case is the most visible effort of a new federal task force designed to crack down on smut in America. Isaacs, however, says his work is an extreme but constitutionally protected form of art.

"There's no question the stuff is disgusting," said Diamond, who has spent much of his career representing pornographers. "The question is should we throw people in jail for it?"

Isaacs, 57, a Los Angeles advertising agency owner who says he used to market fine art in commercial projects, calls himself a "shock artist" and says he went into distributing and producing films about fetishes because "I wanted to do something extreme."

"I'm fighting for art," he said in an interview before his federal trial got under way. "Art is on trial."

He plans to testify as his own expert witness and said he will cite the historic battles over obscenity involving authors James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence.

One of his exhibits, he said, will be a picture of famed artist Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," a porcelain urinal signed by the artist in 1917.

Diamond said Isaacs also will tell jurors the works have therapeutic value for people with the same fetishes depicted on screen.

"They don't feel so isolated," Diamond said. "They have fetishes that other people have."

Isaacs makes a brief appearance in one of the videos he produced; others that he distributed were imported from other countries.

The business has been lucrative. At one point, he has said, he was selling 1,000 videos a month at $30 apiece. Then his office was raided by FBI agents who bought his videos online with undercover credit cards.

The government obtained an indictment against Isaacs on a variety of obscenity charges, including importation or transportation of obscene material for sale. Prosecutors have declined to comment about the case.

Jean Rosenbluth, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at University of Southern California, said such prosecutions were rare until the creation of the U.S. Department of Justice Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. Child pornography cases are handled by a separate unit.

"The problem with obscenity is no one really knows what it is," she said. "It's relatively simple to paint something as an artistic effort even if it's offensive."

The test of obscenity still hinges on a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which held that a work is not legally obscene if it has "literary, artistic, political or scientific value."

Jurors also are asked to determine whether the material in question violates standards of what is acceptable to the community at large.

"This task force was quite controversial and many in the Department of Justice felt that it was a waste of resources," Rosenbluth said. "Because of the pressure, they seem to have chosen the worst cases they can find to prosecute."

Each of the four counts against Isaacs carries a five-year maximum prison sentence. Prosecutors also are seeking forfeiture of assets obtained through his video sales. Two of the original six counts were dropped.

"A lot of this is about sending a message — `Don't make this stuff. Don't put it on the Internet. We don't want it here,'" Rosenbluth said.

Rosenbluth said prosecutors would be emboldened to pursue similar cases if Isaacs is convicted, though there would be lengthy challenges on appeal.

In an unusual twist, the trial is being presided over by the chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Alex Kozinski, under a program that allows appellate judges to occasionally handle criminal trials at the District Court level. Kozinski is known as a strong defender of free speech and First Amendment rights.

Eight men and six women were chosen for the jury Tuesday. Two will be designated alternates later. The panel was to hear opening statements Wednesday before viewing the movies.

When jury selection began Monday, he urged prospects to be open about their opinions and incurred an onslaught of negative statements. Within the first hour, he dismissed 26 men and women who said they could not be fair to the defendant because they were repulsed by the subject matter. By day's end, half the panel of 100 had been excused.

"I think watching something like that would make me physically ill, nauseous," said one woman. "It's affecting me physically now just thinking about it."

One man fired angry comments at the ponytailed Isaacs.

"Hearing stuff about feces made me sick and the defendant looks like my ex-business partner who did some of these things. He looks guilty as sin to me," said the man. "It turns my stomach thinking about it."

Several prospects marched up to the judge's bench for private conferences when he told them that the films also involved violence against women. They, too, were excused, as were several who cited their religious beliefs.

Asked how long they would have to watch the movies, Kozinski told them it would be about five hours and "I will be there watching with you. This is part of the job we're doing."

The justices have twice struck down the award to the family of a longtime smoker of Marlboros, made by Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris USA.

Oregon courts have repeatedly upheld the judgment. The most recent ruling, in January, followed a high court decision last year that said jurors may punish a defendant only for harm done to someone who is suing, not other smokers who could make similar claims.

The justices will consider only whether the Oregon Supreme Court in essence ignored the U.S. high court's ruling, not whether the amount of the judgment is constitutionally permissible.

The case before the court concerned arbitrary employment decisions that do not involve race, gender or other categories that are explicitly protected by federal law.

Individual public employees typically have a variety of protections from personnel actions, but invoking the equal protection clause of the Constitution is not one of them, Chief Justice John Roberts said in his majority opinion.

The court's 6-3 decision in the case from Oregon was one of four opinions handed down Monday as the justices race to complete their work before their customary summer break begins in late June. Twenty-two cases remain to be decided and more opinions are expected Thursday.

Major cases still undecided include the rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, the ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., and whether people convicted of raping children can be given the death penalty.

Court-appointed receiver J. Clark Kelso has been given broad authority by federal courts to fix the nation's largest state prison system's medical and mental health care, treatment so poor it has been ruled unconstitutional.

Kelso and the Legislature, however, have been unable to agree on where the funding to fix it should come from. The state Senate has blocked borrowing that Kelso says he needs to fix medical care for the state's more than 170,000 prisoners.

If the receiver doesn't get his way, a judge could order the money taken directly from the state treasury.

To avoid that, Kelso wants the governor's office to bypass the Legislature and sign a contract authorizing up to $7 billion for the medical care expansion. The money would go toward seven health care centers that would house 10,000 inmates in need of medical attention and mental health treatment.

Ronald D'Alessandro has started a law firm, Keohane & D'Alessandro PLLC with offices in San Francisco, New York City and Albany, N.Y. "My partner is in San Francisco," said D'Alessandro. D'Alessandro, 35, met his law partner, Stephen Keohane about seven years ago when Keohane was counsel for IBM. "He was one of my best clients," D'Alessandro said. A senior associate, Darrell Pogue, is based in New York City.

D'Alessandro was one of the founders of the Albany intellectual property firm Hoffman, Warnick & D'Alessandro LLC. Michael Hoffman, Spencer Warnick and D'Alessandro started the firm about nine years ago when they met while working at another firm, Schmeiser Olsen & Watts LLP in Latham.

Last week, it was announced that the firm was rebranding, calling itself Hoffman Warnick LLC. D'Alessandro said he enjoyed starting up another firm.

"I didn't realize how much fun it was to be back at the grass roots," he said. "Each day can bring something different. You never know what the next day will bring. It can bring headaches but also a lot of interesting challenges."

It took a week for the furniture to arrive at his new office at 1881 Western Ave.

The unanimous decision came in a case involving the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

The court ruled in favor of two firms alleging that manipulation by competitors had resulted in a disproportionate share of tens of thousands of tax liens going to the competitors.

Tax sales in Cook County enable the collection of unpaid property taxes, giving buyers of tax liens an opportunity to take over property if the owners don't pay up.

The issue for Phoenix Bond & Indemnity Co. and BCS Services Inc. was whether they could sue even though they had not relied on allegedly fraudulent statements the defendants submitted to Cook County. The statements said that each tax buyer was truly independent from other tax buyers in the competitive bidding.

Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said that nothing in the RICO law required Phoenix and BCS to show that they relied on alleged misrepresentations by a defendant.

Cook County requires that each buyer submit bids only in its name and not through any related entity.

Phoenix and BCS alleged that a number of related entities "packed the room" in tax sales by having relatives in two families bid for the same properties.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices said that Anup Engquist must be a member of a class targeted for discrimination in order to bring a claim.

The case revolves around an 8-year-old Supreme Court decision. In that case in 2000, the justices ruled that a person may assert an equal protection claim as a "class of one" rather than on the usual grounds of racial discrimination against an entire group.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the "class of one" theory does not apply in the public employment context, where the government has greater leeway in dealings with its employees.

Born in India, Engquist worked at a laboratory operated by the Oregon Department of Agriculture. She says that after she complained about a colleague who allegedly harassed her, the man and a superior eliminated her position. A jury subsequently ruled in Engquist's favor.

Nine federal appeals courts have ruled that public employee claims similar to Engquist's can go forward.