The opponents, mainly Democrats, view voter ID a modern-day poll tax that disproportionately affect poor, minority and elderly voters — who tend to back Democrats. Yet, a federal judge found that opponents of the law were unable to produce evidence of a single Indiana resident who had been barred from voting because of the law.

The Supreme Court, which famously split 5-4 in the case that sealed the 2000 presidential election for George Bush, will take up the Indiana law on January 9, just as the 2008 presidential primaries are getting under way.

A decision should come by late June, in time to be felt in the November elections in Indiana and in Georgia, the other state with a strict photo ID requirement, as well as in a handful of other states.

The justices will be asked to decide whether the law is an impermissible attempt to discourage certain voters or a reasonable precaution among several efforts aimed at cutting down on illegal voting.

"There's more than a little bit of irony in going to the Supreme Court and asking them to rise above partisan politics in election cases," said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The court's decision in the disputed 2000 election is partly responsible for the ensuing increase in election-related lawsuits and the loss of confidence by some groups in the voting system, Hasen said. Yet, the other branches of government seem more politicized than ever, leaving the court as the best option despite the 2000 election dispute, he said.

Indiana argues that demands for identification are frequent in today's society, and producing a photo ID at polling places is hardly onerous.

"In light of such widespread demands for ... government-issued photo identification, it is almost shocking that in late 2007 Indiana can be characterized as even unusual in requiring it at the polls," the state said in its court filing.

The Bush administration maintains states need not wait for fraud to occur to take action to prevent it. "The state's interest in deterring voter fraud before it happens is evident from the monumental harm that can come from such fraud," the government said in its supporting brief.

The law's opponents counter that an ID may be just one card among many in most people's wallets, but some groups are far less likely to have them.

Homeless people wanting to vote might face the most difficulty under the law. While the state will provide a voter ID card free of charge to the poor, applicants still must have a birth certificate or other documentation to get the ID card.

"I think it's wonderful, but if you can't prove who you are, you can't get an ID," said Carter Wolf, executive director of Horizon House, which provides services to homeless people.

Getting a birth certification isn't always easy, Wolf said, or cheap. Sometimes it can cost $60 to $70 to get a birth certificate from other states.

"Obtaining a photo identification card under Indiana law requires documentation that is difficult, if not impossible, for many homeless individuals to provide," Carter Phillips, a leading Supreme Court lawyer, wrote in a supporting brief.

Even without an ID, indigent people can cast provisional ballots, then show up within 10 days at county offices and sign a form attesting to their vote.

But the Marion County Election Board, which includes Indianapolis, said just two of 34 voters who cast provisional ballots because they lacked voter ID showed up at county offices to validate their vote in the 2007 municipal election. Their signatures all matched those on file, but could not be counted because of the photo ID requirement.

Hasen said while neither side has abundant evidence to back its position the fraud argument is far less plausible than the claim that and ID requirement will reduce voter turnout.

Someone wanting to sway an election through fraud would be unlikely to get individuals to show up at the polls, pretend to be someone else and then ask them to cast a secret, unverifiable ballot, said Hasen.

But he said, "When voting is more difficult, people tend to not vote."

Opponents to the law argue the real potential for voter fraud lies in the filing of absentee ballots and that Indiana has made it easier to vote absentee in recent years.

James M. DiBlasio, 38, of Carmel, Ind., worked for Aspen-based Ski.com from September 2004 to November 2006, court documents said. The company is a travel agency that specializes in ski vacations.

An indictment accused him of accessing a Ski.com server in Denver to delete airline reservations and other information. Ski.com's losses were estimated at $5,000.

He originally was charged with two counts of unlawful access to protected computers and seven counts of intentional damage to protected computers.

A statement filed in U.S. District Court in Denver said DiBlasio planned to plead guilty to one count of each charge. A change of plea hearing was scheduled for Thursday.

A former sheriff's deputy who suffered a career-ending back injury when shocked by a Taser stun gun during training has lost an attempt to revive his product liability lawsuit.

The Arizona Court of Appeals on Monday upheld a Maricopa County Superior Court jury's verdict for Scottsdale-based Taser International Inc. in a lawsuit filed by Samuel Powers, a former county sheriff's deputy.

A three-judge Court of Appeals panel ruled unanimously that a trial judge was correct to rule that Powers wasn't entitled to have jurors instructed they could hold Taser liable for dangers that the company didn't learn of until Powers' injury.

Arizona has not adopted a so-called "hindsight" test for strict liability product claims involving allegations of failing of defects, the Court of Appeals said.

Employing the hindsight test in warning defect cases "would be tantamount to imposing a duty on manufacturers to warn of unknowable dangers," Judge Daniel A. Baker wrote for the panel.

Powers, a 16-year veteran of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, was shocked July 16, 2002, while participating in an MCSO training and certification course on Taser's M-26 stun gun.

According to court papers, he suffered a compression fracture of a spinal disc and, during treatment, was discovered to have severe osteoporosis, a condition that weakens bones. His doctor ordered him restricted to light duty, and Powers resigned as a deputy on June 2003.

Powers' suit alleged that Taser's M-26 stun gun was unreasonably dangerous and defective because it lacked adequate instructions and warnings, but Taser argued that it did not know that the muscle contractions produced by the weapon were strong enough to cause a fracture.

The ruling also upheld the trial court's order that Powers reimburse Taser for its expert witness fees and costs because Powers had rejected a pretrial settlement offer that would have been more favorable to him than the eventual outcome of the case.

Powers argued that the payment order was improper because the settlement offer was conditioned on its terms being kept confidential, but the Court of Appeals said that requirement didn't violate state court rules.

Thomas C. Wilmer, one of Powers' attorney, said he hadn't seen the Court of Appeals ruling but that it was likely that Powers would ask the Arizona Supreme Court to review it.

Property-casualty insurer Travelers Cos. Inc. said Monday it settled a class action lawsuit for an undisclosed amount, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The lawsuit, brought by certain shareholders of the company, alleged violations of federal securities laws, saying the company failed to disclose its practice of paying brokers commissions on a contingent basis, among other things.

Additionally, the St. Paul, Minn.-based company reached an agreement with the attorneys general of Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, Oregon, Texas, West Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia -- as well as the chief financial officer of Florida and the Office of Insurance Regulation of Florida -- settling their industrywide investigations into insurance placement practices.

Both settlements are subject to court approval. Travelers said the settlements will not affect its financial results. Details of the agreements were not released.

Technology was late to come to the world of lawyers and law firms, long known for quill pens and steno pads. But now that it has arrived, it is spreading briskly.

"Within the past five years, technology in law firms has really, really advanced," said Randi Mayes, executive director of the International Legal Technology Association, an Austin, Texas, group that represents 1,700 US law firms and legal departments.

A primary driver of this evolution is the need for law firms to keep pace with the technology used by their corporate clients.

The explosion of electronic discovery has also forced law firms to become more tech-savvy.

And new federal statutes that require extensive financial reporting and electronic record-keeping, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, have forced the rapid adoption of technology in the legal profession.

Technology has become critical to most industries, of course. But the legal profession resisted the age of technology much longer than many others.

"When I became a lawyer in 1990, the legal profession was a paper-and-pen business, and almost everything was done by typewriter and forms," said Alan Klevan, a Wellesley lawyer who chairs the Massachusetts Bar Association's law practice management section, which helps law firms use technology to enhance the practice of law.

Last month, the association hosted a legal technology expo in Needham that attracted several dozen technology firms that pitched their products to lawyers.

Now, however, the management of cases can be so complicated and time-consuming that technological assistance is critical. Software programs used by law firms handle receipts, billings, expenses, negotiating leases and insurance, personnel issues, time keeping, word processing, cost recovery, conflict checking, marketing, scanning, docketing, and data storage. Special tax-reporting software exists for trusts and estates departments, and financial software aids bankruptcy groups.

During electronic discovery, countless documents, files, phone records, and electronic correspondence are mined in civil litigation. Software can be used to comb through e-mail systems and identify key information, sparing lawyers or legal assistants the task of reading through hundreds or even thousands of e-mails in search of important data.

"Before, we'd get boxes of paper, and paralegals would go box by box by box, coding and figuring out what was important on each page," said Henry Chace, chief information officer at the Boston law firm Burns & Levinson, whose 125 lawyers collectively use about 70 software applications. "Now we just scan those documents and use algorithms to determine what's important or not."

As law firms increasingly become global operations, their multiple offices worldwide must also have time-and-billing software that works with multiple currencies.

At large firms, conflict checking, to ensure that the firm does not represent a client whose interests clash with the interests of another potential client, is also done electronically.

"If you're opening a matter in San Francisco, you have to find out if you have any conflicts with the Tokyo, New York, Singapore, and London offices, and you can't start billing till you know," said Chace, a former president of the International Legal Technology Association. Without software that runs such checks, the process would be unmanageable, he said.

Litigators tend to be at the cutting edge of technological advances because they rely on high-tech software to manage their cases and impress juries during trials.

But other types of lawyers remain well behind the curve. Many real estate lawyers, for example, still make in-person visits to courthouses and registries of deeds to file paper documents.

But that, too, is changing.

"Real estate lawyers used to have to trudge to the registry with a check and documents in hand," said Paul Roth, regional sales director for Simplifile, a system that enables real estate documents to be filed electronically. "Now they just have to sign on [to a computer] and send them in."

Simplifile sells its product in 20 states, but in Massachusetts the only registries of deeds that allow electronic filing so far are in Lowell, Springfield, and Plymouth, Roth said.

Despite these technological advances, "I still drag a lot of solo practitioners kicking and screaming into the technological age," Roth said.

"Most of them say they're fine the way they are, and they really want to leave it to the next generation to change."

The majority opinion in the 5-2 ruling, written by Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer, said the Ohio law revised did not violate the constitutional rights of injured parties to trial by jury, to a remedy for their injuries or to due process and equal protection.

"The decision in this case affirms the General Assembly's efforts over the last several decades to enact meaningful tort reforms," Moyer wrote.

In one of its challenged provisions, the law caps awards at $250,000 or three times the amount of economic damages, whichever is greater, up to an absolute limit of $350,000. The exception is when a plaintiff suffers permanent disability or loss of a limb or bodily organ system.

In another, the law prohibits awards for punitive damages exceeding two times the amount of the compensatory damages awarded the same defendant.

The court threw out a similar law in 1999 in a decision that prompted businesses to criticize Democratic justices who voted against the legislation. Since then, the court has become an all-Republican bench. In the 1999 vote, two Republicans joined the court's two Democrats in striking down the law, which was revised in 2004.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Business Legal Foundation had joined in urging the court to uphold the law.

Groups urging the court to overturn it included the Ohio Academy of Trial Lawyers, the Ohio Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Mothers Against Drunk Driving.