The high court agreed to hear a U.S. Justice Department appeal defending the 1999 animal cruelty law after it was struck down for infringing free-speech protections.

A U.S. appeals court declared the law unconstitutional and overturned the conviction of a Virginia man, Robert Stevens, who sold three videos of pit bulls fighting each other and attacking hogs and wild boars.

His conviction in 2005 was the first in the country under the law. Stevens had been sentenced to 37 months in prison.

By a 10-3 vote, the appeals court rejected the government's argument that, for the first time in more than 25 years, there was a new category of speech not covered by constitutional free-speech protections. Usually, videos and other depictions are protected as free speech, even if they show abhorrent conduct.

Arizona state legislators and the state superintendent of public instruction want to be freed from federal court oversight of the state's programs for English learners. They've been ordered by a lower court judge to spend potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with rulings in a 17-year-old case.

Parents of students attending southern Arizona's Nogales Unified School District sued the state in 1992, contending programs for English-language learners in Nogales were deficient and received inadequate funding from the state.

In 2000, a federal judge found that the state had violated the Equal Educational Opportunities Act's requirements for appropriate instruction for English-language learners. He ordered state legislators to create a plan to provide sufficient funds and placed the state's programs for non-English speaking students under court oversight.

Since then, the two sides have fought over what constitutes compliance with the order. Arizona has more than doubled the amount that schools receive per non-English speaking student and taken several other steps prescribed by the No Child Left Behind Act, a broader education accountability law passed by Congress in 2002.

Plaintiffs say that's not enough to comply with federal law and a judge agreed. But the state appealed, and now the high court will answer the question.

Law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell recruited the Securities and Exchange Commission's former enforcement chief and another former high-level government lawyer to join its white-collar defense group, part of an effort to expand its Washington practice.

Linda Chatman Thomsen, who left the SEC earlier this year, and Raul Yanes, former staff secretary to President George W. Bush, are joining the law firm as partners.

Both had worked at Davis Polk in New York before joining the government.

The duo will be the first litigators in the 11-person Washington office in years.

Former SEC Commissioner Annette Nazareth and Robert Colby, a former deputy director of the SEC's trading and markets division, also recently joined the firm's Washington office to focus on financial regulatory issues.

Davis Polk clients, including large financial institutions, are closely entangled with the government as it has pumped billions of dollars into financial rescue plans. Congress is studying new regulation of financial markets.

The Flint Journal reports 42-year-old Thomas Frazier was jailed Thursday. Court records say he hasn't made a support payment in six years.

The newspaper says the unemployed man could be held for 90 days if he doesn't pay $27,900.

Frazier says he thinks he fathered only three of the children and that it's unrealistic for authorities to expect him to pay child support that was $3,000 a month at one point.

Frazier remains held at the Genesee County Jail. It wasn't immediately clear if he had a lawyer who could speak for him.