The tide of lawsuits unleashed by BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico breaks into an Idaho courtroom on Thursday, just as the company's rivals are counting the cost of a ban on offshore drilling.

Attorneys hoping to lead the legal fight against BP are set to descend on Boise, Idaho, to address a special judicial panel considering how to bring order to the hundreds of civil lawsuits spawned by the spill after a rig explosion on April 20.

"There will be more lawyers in that courtroom than exist in the entire city of Boise put together," Mark Lanier, a Houston-based lawyer who plans to attend the hearing, joked this week. "It's going to be a circus."

Seven U.S. federal judges will convene more than 2,000 miles from the Gulf's oil-smudged shores to consider which U.S. court, or courts, should oversee hundreds of spill-related suits by injured rig workers, fishermen, investors and property owners.

Potentially adding its name to the line of claimants, Royal Dutch Shell Plc idled seven rigs and took a $56 million charge related to the drilling ban on Thursday. Saying the ban would reduce its production by almost 3 million barrels this year, the company did not rule out reclaiming the cash from BP.

Shell, one of the biggest oil producers in the Gulf of Mexico, said it had idled rigs rather than move them elsewhere because the ban's six-month duration meant it was not profitable to redeploy them to other areas.

Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall said Wednesday that while she understands her tenure on the state's high court will always be linked to the legalization of gay marriage, that case holds no greater importance in her mind than the hundreds of other rulings she authored.

"I'm proud of every decision," said Marshall, who surprised even her closest colleagues with the announcement that she planned to retire from the bench by the end of October to spend more time with her husband, former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

The court's 4-3 ruling in the 2003 case called Goodrich v. Department of Public Health paved the way for Massachusetts to become the first U.S. state to allow same-sex couples to wed, igniting a fierce national debate over gay marriage that continues to this day.

"Whether and whom to marry, how to express sexual intimacy, and whether and how to establish a family — these are among the most basic of every individual's liberty and due process rights," Marshall wrote.

The chief justice recalled how a courtroom packed with hundreds of people quickly cleared out after the court heard arguments in the gay marriage case, leaving only a handful of people who were there for other matters.

Gonzalez is accused of taking a satchel worth about $1,400 from the Polo Ralph Lauren store in The Mall at Short Hills on June 29. Police said he removed the sensor device from the satchel and walked out of the store without paying for it.

According to a police report, the Polo store manager reported that the manager of a restaurant in the mall returned the satchel. The restaurant manager said someone had come into the eatery, left the satchel with the hostess and never returned.

Gonzalez faces criminal mischief and shoplifting charges; the shoplifting charge is punishable by up to five years in jail, according to the Essex County Prosecutor's Office. Gonzalez surrendered to police in Millburn on July 5 and has not had to post bail.

Facebook will try to get a New York man's claim for majority ownership of the website thrown out of court, attorneys for the social networking site said Tuesday.

A complaint by Paul Ceglia of Wellsville claims that a 7-year-old contract he signed with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for software development entitles him to 84 percent of the company.

"No one's ever said it's not his signature or it's a fake contract," Ceglia attorney Terrence Connors said during a federal court hearing in Buffalo.

Connors said the two men met when Zuckerberg, then a Harvard University freshman, responded to an ad Ceglia had posted on Craigslist looking for someone to develop software for a street-mapping database he was creating.

Zuckerberg offered to take on Ceglia's project for $1,000, Connors said, and then told Ceglia about a project of his own, a kind of online yearbook for Harvard students that he wanted to expand.

Ceglia said he gave Zuckerberg another $1,000 to continue work on Zuckerberg's "The Face Book," with the condition that Ceglia would own a 50 percent interest in the software and business if it expanded. The percentage grew to 84 percent based on a clause that added a percentage point for each day the project went past its Jan. 1, 2004, due date.

Zuckerberg's undertaking "at that time was a fledgling project," Connors said. "Who knew it would turn into what it has turned into today."

Facebook recently celebrated its 500 millionth user, Connors said.

Angry creditors have thrown plans for an Aug. 4 auction of the Texas Rangers into jeopardy, saying they don't like the bidding procedures and arguing that the lease for the team's ballpark should be severed from the sale.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge D. Michael Lynn on Monday granted a motion to seal the creditors' request to reconsider the bidding procedures that are heavily controlled by Major League Baseball. Lynn approved the procedures last week after making some changes, including delaying the auction for two weeks to give potential buyers more time to secure financing.

Attorneys for Major League Baseball said the creditors' motion filed last week was rehashing arguments already rejected by the judge, including claims that the bidding process would prevent a fair and competitive sale.

Lynn set a Tuesday hearing to consider the objections and possibly rule on a separate lawsuit, filed by creditor JP Morgan Chase Bank, seeking to remove the Rangers Ballpark lease from the sale.

JP Morgan contends the team's parent company, Hicks Sports Group, transferred the lease to the team just before the bankruptcy filing without the bank's approval, as required in its loan agreement. The bank contends that the ballpark lease is not the team's property.

A former University of Kansas athletics official has admitted in court that he knew other school officials were involved in a lucrative ticket-scalping racket but concealed the crime and didn't alert authorities.

Former assistant director of ticket operations Jason Jeffries pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court in Wichita to one count of misprision of a felony. He remains free on his own recognizance and was due back in court for sentencing Sept. 29.

The university has accused Jeffries and five other former employees of scheming to sell at least $1 million in basketball and football tickets to brokers.

Jeffries' attorney said outside the courtroom that Jeffries has accepted his responsibility and has nothing to hide.

A judge was poised to decide whether the government and some fellow judges were right when they said a 70-year-old former civil rights lawyer convicted in a terrorism case received too much leniency when she was sentenced to just over two years in prison.

U.S. District Judge John Koeltl was to resentence attorney Lynne Stewart on Thursday after considering the comments of appeals court judges who said he should review the role of terrorism in her case and consider if she lied when she testified at her trial.

Stewart, facing up to 30 years in prison, was sentenced to two years and four months after her conviction on charges that she let blind Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman communicate with a man who relayed messages to senior members of an Egyptian-based terrorist organization.

Abdel-Rahman is serving a life sentence for conspiracies to blow up New York City landmarks and assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Stewart represented him at his 1995 trial.

Stewart was sentenced in 2006 but was permitted to remain free until the appeals court ruled last November.

Initially, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a resentencing that did not seem to pressure Koeltl to boost the length of the sentence considerably. But it revised its decision a month later, saying it had "serious doubts" whether her sentence was reasonable.

The appeals court said Koeltl might have erred if he decided the terrorism enhancement should not be applied because of Stewart's personal characteristics.