The Washington law firm Arent Fox said Monday that it has named longtime partner Mark M. Katz as its new chairman, a leadership change that comes as the legal sector copes with an economic downturn that has curtailed business and prompted layoffs.

Katz, 52, succeeds Marc L. Fleischaker, who served as chairman of the firm's executive committee for 14 years. Fleischaker will remain at the firm, concentrating on antitrust and civil rights cases.

Like many of its counterparts, Arent Fox has faced declining revenue as corporate clients cut back on legal work, particularly in commercial real estate and finance, Katz said Monday in an interview. Although the firm cut 13 associates and 15 staff members and is in the early stages of restructuring how it bills clients, Katz said Arent Fox wasn't hurt as deeply by the recession because it decided to grow more cautiously during the boom.

"Some of the firms that grew very rapidly and worked on a mega-international platform seem to be running into difficulties," he said. "We've grown on a patient pace, and that's helped us."

As of 2008, the latest year for which statistics from the economic development group Greater Washington Initiative are available, more than 40,000 lawyers worked in the Washington region, second only to the New York area. Nearly 64,000 people work in the legal profession in the Washington region, which employs more people in that sector on a per-capita basis than any U.S. metropolitan area.

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.

Sex.com, one of the most valuable Internet domain names, will go up for auction next week after the previous owner defaulted on its debts.

Escom LLC paid a reported $14 million for the Web site in 2006. But the company failed to repay debt owed to DOM Partners LLC, the New Jersey-based lender that helped finance the deal.

As a result, sex.com will be sold "as is" in the equivalent of a foreclosure sale, according to a letter from DOM Partners' lawyers that was made public Tuesday. The auction is set for March 18 in New York, and bidders are required to appear with a certified check for $1 million to participate.

Richard Maltz, an auctioneer at Maltz Auctions who is overseeing the sale, said there has been a "good amount of interest" in sex.com. But he did not say how much the Web site could sell for.

"It is a very unique property," he said. "It will be an incredible opportunity for someone."

Indeed, sex.com generated $15,000 a day in revenue at one point, according to Charles Carreon, an attorney who wrote about the Web site's legal travails in his book "The Sex.com Chronicles."

By way of comparison, the domain name www.pizza.com reportedly sold for more than $2.5 million at an auction in 2008.

A longtime municipal attorney is alleged to have stolen at least $1 million - and perhaps as much as $3 million - from the village of Calumet Park, where he grew up, according to prosecutors and others familiar with the matter.

Mark J. McCombs, of Chicago, worked for nine years as the village's special counsel for development and is accused of a fraudulent billing scheme meant to bolster his position at the Chicago law firm where he worked until Friday.

Village records show McCombs billed the village for tens of thousands of dollars each month for work that apparently never was done. He helped himself to property tax revenue that flowed into accounts of Calumet Park's tax increment financing districts.

"The billing was a joke. He didn't do any work," said Burt Odelson, the village attorney.

Cook County prosecutors Friday charged McCombs, 50, of the 1300 block of Flournoy Street, with one felony count of theft of government funds in excess of $100,000. McCombs, who faces six to 30 years in prison if convicted, pleaded innocent. Bail was set at $25,000.

McCombs was an attorney and shareholder with Greenberg Traurig, a global law firm that employs nearly 1,800 attorneys and has offices in the United States, Asia and Europe. He's accused of billing the village at least $1 million for work he never performed, but a village official pegged the number at closer to $3 million.

McCombs wired the cash to his law firm in a scheme designed to boost his reputation as a moneymaker and to give him greater visibility and a higher pay rate at the firm, Assistant State's Attorney John Mahoney said in court.

Greenberg Traurig fired McCombs on Friday afternoon after learning of the charges and had no previous knowledge of his alleged misdeeds, according to Jill Perry, managing director of the firm.

The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously upheld part of the U.S. bankruptcy law that bars attorneys from advising clients to take on more debt while considering a bankruptcy filing.

The opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor reverses a ruling by a U.S. appeals court that a provision of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was unconstitutionally broad and violated free-speech rights.

The provision prohibits bankruptcy professionals like attorneys from advising their clients to incur more debt, such as mortgages or student loans, before filing for creditor protection.

The ruling is a victory for the U.S. Justice Department, which defended the provision. It said Congress adopted the law fight abuse of the bankruptcy system encouraged by lawyers.

Department attorneys also argued that the law can be interpreted narrowly to prohibit only advice that a client take new debt with the intent of abusing the bankruptcy system. Sotomayor agreed with that interpretation.

The Minneapolis-based bankruptcy law firm Milavetz, Gallop & Milavetz PA, two of its attorneys and two prospective clients sued in 2007, saying the law violated constitutional free-speech rights under the First Amendment.

A U.S. appeals court based in St. Louis agreed, ruling that the law prevented lawyers from fulfilling their duty to clients to give them appropriate financial advice.

The Supreme Court will decide whether drug makers can be sued by parents who claim their children suffered serious health problems from vaccines.

The justices on Monday agreed to hear an appeal from parents in Pittsburgh who want to sue Wyeth over the serious side effects their daughter, six months old at the time, allegedly suffered as a result of the company's diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled against Robalee and Russell Bruesewitz, saying a 1986 federal law bars their claims.

That law set up a special vaccine court to handle disputes as part of its aim of insuring a stable vaccine supply by shielding companies from most lawsuits.

Wyeth, now owned by Pfizer, Inc., prevailed at the appeals court but also joined in asking the court to hear the case, saying it presents an important and recurring legal issue that should be resolved.

The Obama administration joined the parties in calling for high court review, although the government takes the side of the manufacturers.

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to referee a dispute between NASA and some of its independent contractors over required security checks, a decision that could affect how the federal government investigates the background of current and future employees.

The justices agreed to hear an appeal from the space agency, which had its worker investigations at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California blocked after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the questions threatened the constitutional rights of workers.

The high court's decision in this case could throw into question the background checks routinely done on all federal government workers.

While the case before the court deals solely with whether to dissolve the temporary restraining order placed on NASA's background checks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA said in its filings that the forms in question "are the same ones that have long been used to conduct background checks for applicants for federal employment."

Twenty-eight scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sued the federal government after NASA required them to submit to background checks. They said the agency was invading their privacy by requiring the investigations, which included probes into medical records and questioning of friends about everything from their finances to their sex lives.