The justices Monday agreed to decide whether drug makers can be sued outside a special judicial forum set up by Congress in 1986 to address specific claims about safety.

The so-called vaccine court has handled such disputes and was designed to ensure a reliable, steady supply of the drugs by reducing the threat of lawsuits against pharmaceutical firms.

The questions in the latest case are whether such liability claims can proceed, if the vaccine-related injuries could have been avoided by better product design, and if federal officials had approved another, allegedly safer drug. Oral arguments in the dispute will be held in the fall.

Shane Kettner cried as he entered the pleas Wednesday in Portage County Circuit Court to three counts of first-degree intentional homicide and endangering safety.

Investigators found the bodies of 30-year-old Christine Gollon, 3-year-old Ashley Kettner and 2-year-old Griffin Kettner on April 30 after breaking into the family's barricaded home in Nelsonville. Gollon's mother had called police worried about her daughter's welfare.

Kettner was found with his infant daughter, Esther. Authorities say gasoline had been poured around the house and Kettner had written a suicide note.

The 36-year-old Kettner initially pleaded not guilty, then changed his plea to not guilty by reason of mental disease.

The state appeals court has upheld the involuntary manslaughter conviction of a woman in the June 2003 death of a baby in a Reading day care facility.

Ann Power had challenged her conviction in the death of 3-month-old MacKenzie Corrigan of Stoneham, who died of shaken baby syndrome after being injured in the day care facility Power ran in her home.

Power was convicted in 2006 of involuntary manslaughter by reasonof wanton or reckless conduct and received a three-to-five-year sentence. She also pleaded guilty to operating a family day care home without a license.

The Massachusetts Appeals Court rejected her appeal in a 16-page opinion written by Judge Mitchell J. Sikora.

The high court overturned a lower court decision throwing out a settlement between freelancers, publishers and database owners including Reed Elsevier Inc., educational publisher and owner of the LexisNexis information service.

The proposed settlement covers freelancers who registered the copyright to their works as well as those who didn't. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York had said courts generally don't have authority over infringement claims on works that are not copyrighted.

Justice Clarence Thomas disagreed, writing that the lower court did have authority to approve the settlement.

The lawsuit followed a Supreme Court ruling in 2001 that freelance writers have online rights to their work. The case largely applied to articles, photographs and illustrations that were produced 15 or more years ago, before freelance contracts provided for the material's electronic use.

The Supreme Court is allowing a lawsuit to proceed against Hustler Magazine over decades-old nude photographs of a woman that were published after she was killed by her husband, wrestler Chris Benoit.

The court turned down Hustler's appeal Monday. Benoit killed his wife, Nancy, and their son before committing suicide in 2007.

Hustler published 20-year-old nude photographs of Nancy Benoit after the deaths gained international attention.

Her family filed a federal lawsuit against the Larry Flynt Publishing Group, Hustler's publisher, claiming that the woman, a model and former professional wrestler herself, had asked the photographer to destroy the images immediately after they were shot.

A small-plane pilot from San Francisco, who hid his HIV-positive status for years out of fear of losing his license, can sue the government for disclosing his condition during a fraud investigation, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

A federal judge in San Francisco dismissed Stan Cooper's damage suit in 2008, despite finding that the Federal Aviation Administration and the Social Security Administration had violated Cooper's rights by sharing his confidential personal and medical records. Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said Cooper hadn't been harmed financially and that federal privacy law doesn't authorize suits for emotional distress.

In reinstating the suit Monday, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the law was intended to compensate people for harm they suffer when a federal agency intentionally discloses their confidential records.

That harm often consists of embarrassment rather than out-of-pocket losses, Judge Milan Smith said in the 3-0 ruling.

Cooper, 67, a pilot since 1964, gave up his license after he was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1985, when FAA rules still barred anyone with the AIDS virus from flying a plane. He said he reapplied in 1994 but did not disclose his medical condition.

Cooper's condition worsened in 1995 and he applied for Social Security benefits, with the assurance that his medical records would remain confidential.

He said he regained his health, discontinued his benefits and applied for a renewal of his license in 1998 after the FAA dropped its ban on HIV-positive pilots. He still did not disclose his condition, explaining later that the FAA required 10 years of medical records but didn't say how it would evaluate them.

The FAA revoked his license in 2005 after obtaining information from the Social Security Administration in the short-lived "Operation Safe Pilot," which examined records of 45,000 pilots, all in Northern California, to see if they had committed fraud in obtaining Social Security benefits or a pilot's license.

As litigators, cynics and viewers of A Civil Action know, how and where a lawsuit is brought can determine its outcome at least as often as the merits of the case. Perhaps the most potent civil procedure decision is the case's forum: state or federal court. Generally, corporate defendants prefer federal courts, and plaintiffs' attorneys prefer state courts. As a result "forum shopping" battles dominate the early stages of proceedings, as the sides fight over whether a corporation can be deemed a "citizen" of the state the plaintiffs come from; if both sides are from the same state, the case stays in that state's court.

So the big issue is where a corporation has citizenship. The Circuit Courts have interpreted the key statutory language -- citizenship exists where the "principal place of business" is -- in a few ways, but most assess the "total activity" of the corporation, including its purposes, type of activity, and legal site, and most of the others similarly look to the operations of the business as a whole. Only the 7th Circuit focused on the company's "nerve center", essentially meaning the place where the company is headquartered.

In Hertz Corp. v. Friend, our business-friendly Supreme Court unanimously swept away the case-by-case assessments of where businesses actually conduct their business and adopted the 7th Circuit's nerve center approach. Now corporations can insure federal diversity jurisdiction -- plaintiffs and defendants coming from different states -- whenever they most want it by (re)locating their headquarters.

Expect this decision to produce two dynamics. First, some corporations will relocate out of states where the courts are viewed as particularly plaintiff friendly, insuring claims against them will not be brought in those courts. Second, corporations will threaten to leave, if the state legislatures don't amend their laws to make corporate-friendly outcomes more likely if the case is heard in the state court.