The Supreme Court has again reinstated the conviction of a California woman for shaking her 7-week-old grandson in a case that has become a tug-of-war with the federal appeals court in San Francisco.

Shirley Ree Smith was convicted in December 1997 and was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

After California appeals courts ruled against Smith, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction in 2006. The appellate judges said they found "no demonstrable support" for the prosecution's theory of the case. Prosecutors said that Smith lost her temper when Etzel Dean Glass III began to cry and shook him to death.

In 2007, the high court ordered the 9th Circuit to reconsider its decision based on a recent Supreme Court ruling. In that case, the justices overturned another ruling by the appeals court that was favorable to a convicted killer.

Missouri's top judges questioned on Thursday whether a 2005 law limiting medical malpractice lawsuits is being wrongly applied to people retroactively and is discriminating against the spouses of those injured.

Attorneys for patients argued to the state Supreme Court that the law violates numerous provisions of the Missouri Constitution and that lawmakers had no rational basis to reduce the amount of money that people who had been harmed could win from medical providers.

The law was a priority of the Republican-led Legislature and then-Gov. Matt Blunt. They claimed "tort reform" was essential to curtail rising liability insurance premiums for doctors and to ensure that health care was available and affordable for Missouri residents.

A main change in the 2005 law lowered the cap for non-economic damages such as pain and suffering in medical malpractice cases to a flat $350,000 per lawsuit. Missouri's previous limit of $579,000 had been adjusted annually for inflation and had been interpreted by courts to apply to multiple parties in a lawsuit.

A Massachusetts law that sharply restricts out-of-state winemakers from shipping their products directly to consumers in the state is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled.

Thursday's decision by the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold a lower court ruling could open the door for connoisseurs in Massachusetts to purchase more of their favorite wines online or by mail order from domestic producers.

The law, approved by the Legislature in 2006 over the veto of then-Gov. Mitt Romney, created a multi-tiered system in which wineries that produce more than 30,000 gallons a year must decide whether to sell retail in Massachusetts through an in-state wholesaler or apply for a license to ship wines directly to consumers. They cannot, however, do both.

The cap does not affect any of the nearly three dozen wineries based in Massachusetts, all of which are small and produce under the 30,000-gallon limit.

"We hold that (the law) violates the Commerce Clause because the effect of its particular gallonage cap is to change the competitive balance between in-state and out-of-state wineries in a way that benefits Massachusetts's wineries and significantly burdens out-of-state competitors," the appellate court wrote in its decision.

As Delaware's first season of sports betting winds down, Governor Jack Markell says the state will challenge the federal Appeals Court ruling that limited the Delaware to offering parlay bets on NFL games.  Governor Markell's office confirms the First State will petition the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in August that shot down Delaware's plan to offer single game betting on all sports.

The state has retained the Washington D.C. firm of Sidley Austin to handle the appeal.  That firm specializes in Supreme Court work.

The decision to move forward is based in part on the willingness of the state's three racinos, Delaware Park, Dover Downs, and Harrington Raceway, to foot the bill for the appeal.  The three racinos are currently the only venues that can offer sports betting in Delaware.

Governor Markell's spokesman, Brian Selander, says the state will offer some new arguments in its appeal.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Delaware's plan to offer single game bets on all sports in late August, siding with the NFL, NCAA, and other pro leagues who challenged Delaware.  The Court ruled Delaware's sports betting plan violated the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which prohibits sports betting.  Delaware is one of four states with an exemption to PASPA, since it previously offered NFL parlay bets, but a three judge Third Circuit panel ruled narrowly that Delaware's exemption is limited to the same NFL parlay bets it offered back in 1976.

The Florida Bar is investigating at least 35 former senior lawyers in the now-bankrupt Fort Lauderdale law firm headed by Scott Rothstein, who was disbarred before he was criminally charged last month with using the firm to run a $1.2 billion investment racket.

The Bar confirmed to The Miami Herald Wednesday that it is examining whether those members of the former firm -- Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler -- lied about the amount of money in client trust accounts and whether they stole any of it.

Rothstein is scheduled to plead guilty Jan. 27 to federal racketeering, fraud and money laundering charges stemming from his massive Ponzi scheme, which was fueled with plundered client and investor funds.

Several of Rothstein's former partners have said they were unware of his scam, in which he used the law firm to sell bogus legal settlements to wealthy investors over the past four years.

But prosecutors, without mentioning names, have said that some of the law firm's employees ``do have apparent criminal culpability.''

The Florida Bar board of governors and its president, Jesse Diner, launched their investigation into Rothstein in early November when word of the scandal broke, and then the following month decided to pursue the probe of the other lawyers.

``The Bar takes this issue very seriously,'' Diner, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer, said Wednesday. ``The Bar is actively investigating and will pursue remedies against anyone who has violated any rules. This investigation didn't stop with Scott Rothstein.

Chinese software developers over the Green Dam Youth Escort monitoring program suffered several targeted attacks earlier this week, when documents containing malicious exploits were sent to attorneys, the firm stated late Wednesday.

On Monday evening, lawyers at the firm of Gipson Hoffman & Pancione received e-mails that appeared to have been sent by associates, the group said in its statement. The Trojan e-mail messages contained either links to Web sites or attachments and were specially constructed to retrieve data from the victim's computer or the company's server.

"The specific source of the attacks has not yet been determined, but it appears that they attacks were initiated within China," the firm said in its statement.

Last week, filtering software firm CYBERsitter announced that it had retained Gipson Hoffman & Pancione to sue the Chinese government, two Chinese software developers and seven PC makers for allegedly distributing its software code as part of the Chinese state-sponsored filtering and monitoring program known as Green Dam Youth Escort. The latest incident follows Google's announcement on Tuesday that it was considering pulling out of China following serious attacks on its networks that resulted in stolen intellectual property and the surveillance of human-rights activists in China.

The attacks on law firm GHP are not the first attempt to infiltrate companies involved in the claims against China and Green Dam. Last summer, CYBERsitter also received two PDF files containing malicious code.

The law firm has contacted the FBI and the U.S. government and the incident is under investigation, according to its statement.

The Supreme Court split along ideological lines Wednesday as it barred a federal judge in San Francisco from broadcasting a high-profile trial involving same-sex marriage.

The court issued an unsigned opinion that said lower courts had not followed proper procedure in approving plans for the broadcast. The trial is to consider the constitutionality of Proposition 8, California's ban on same-sex marriage, and the Supreme Court cited arguments from proponents of the ban that releasing video of witnesses could subject them to harassment and even physical danger.

The court's liberal bloc -- joined for the first time in an ideological split by Sonia Sotomayor, the new justice -- issued a strong dissent. It said the court's "extraordinary legal relief" was unjustified.

The majority "identifies no real harm" from televising the trial, "let alone irreparable harm to justify its issuance of this stay," wrote Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who was joined by Sotomayor and Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "And the public interest weighs in favor of providing access to the courts."

The court on Monday blocked U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker's plan to stream live video from the trial, which started that day, to five courthouses across the country and to later release the proceedings for broadcast on YouTube. The justices' more complete ruling came at the end of the day Wednesday.