Kagan gave the keynote address at the daylong event that also included a lunchtime speech by retiring Justice David Souter.

Wood, who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago said she had long planned to attend the conference, but she would not answer any questions about the court.

She declined to say whether she was visiting the White House during her stay in Washington.

Wood and Kagan are among the candidates the president is considering to replace Souter, according to officials familiar with President Barack Obama's thinking.

Also attending the day's panel discussions at Georgetown University Law Center were Justice Stephen Breyer and retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who has led the annual event since her retirement from the court in 2006.

She noted that Souter is "going to join me in that now very exclusive group of retired Supreme Court justices. His presence will double the membership."

"There are no neat or easy answers here," Obama said in a speech in which he pledged anew to "clean up the mess at Guantanamo" that he said the nation had inherited from the Bush administration.

Obama conceded that some of the detainees would end up in U.S. prisons and insisted those facilities were tough enough to house even the most dangerous inmates.

Obama decried arguments used against his plans.

"We will be ill-served by the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue," he declared.

Speaking at the National Archives, Obama said he wouldn't do anything to endanger the American people.

The Kentucky Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling Thursday, gave Stella Morris of Cumberland the go-ahead to seek punitive damages from H & D Mining Inc.

The company had filed a motion to have the lawsuit dismissed. That motion was denied by the trial judge, the Kentucky Court of Appeals and now the Supreme Court.

David "Bud" Morris Jr., 29, bled to death in 2005 after being struck by a coal hauler, severing his legs just below the knees.

The opinion issued Tuesday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Wallace Dixon recommended dismissing the lawsuit against Duke. Dixon used phrases such as "this shot also lands in the drink" in the decision, which now goes to a District Court judge.

Giuliani's attorney said Wednesday he wants the case to move forward.

Giuliani is the son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. His lawsuit claims that Duke's golf coach manufactured accusations against him to justify kicking him off the team.

A Duke spokesman said the opinion recognized there is no right to play on a team.

The appeals court in Washington ruled that the White House Office of Administration is not an agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act, allowing the White House to keep secret documents about an e-mail system that has been plagued with problems.

During its first term, the Bush White House failed to install electronic record-keeping for e-mail when it switched to a new system, resulting in millions of messages that could not be found. The Bush White House discovered the problem in 2005 and rejected a proposed solution.

A group known as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued to get documents about the office's electronic record-keeping, including reports analyzing system problems, plans to find the missing e-mails and create an improved system and records of any retained messages.

In response to court orders in the case, the White House disclosed that it has located nearly 3,500 pages of documents about problems with its e-mail system. But the Bush administration argued in this case for the first time that the office's records are not subject to public disclosure, even though it had responded to hundreds of other FOIA requests in the past decade and even included instructions on its Web site for filing them.

Consumers have the right to sue as a group over advertising they believe misled them into buying products, a divided state Supreme Court ruled Monday in reinstating a massive suit against the tobacco industry.

The 4-3 decision rejected business arguments that, if accepted, would have virtually prohibited class-action suits for false advertising by requiring proof that every plaintiff - millions of them, in some cases - had seen an allegedly deceptive ad and relied on it to make a purchase. The court majority said that evidence is required only for the single plaintiff or small group that represents the entire class.

"This gives the consumers rights to protect themselves from fraudulent advertising," said Mark Robinson, a lawyer for the smokers who sued tobacco companies in 1997.

The ruling could make California "the class-action capital of the country," retorted William Stern, a lawyer for business organizations and a co-author of Proposition 64, a 2004 ballot measure at the heart of the case.

The suit accused the companies of waging a long advertising campaign that concealed cigarettes' addictive and harmful effects. Unlike individual suits over illnesses allegedly caused by tobacco company deception, the current suit seeks reimbursement of money spent by every Californian who bought cigarettes during the period covered by the case: June 10, 1993, to April 23, 2001.

The case was filed under California's unfair-competition law, a far-reaching statute that lets private citizens sue on behalf of the general public over illegal business practices, including deceptive advertising. The law was narrowed by the business-sponsored Prop. 64, which requires a plaintiff to show that he or she had actually been harmed by the business practice.

Prop. 64 did not say, however, how the new requirement would affect class actions, in which an individual or a small group sues on behalf of consumers in the same circumstances. The crucial question Monday was whether every member of the class must show harm from the challenged business practice, a virtual impossibility in most cases.