The U.S Supreme Court will take up a number of high-profile cases in its term that began on October 5^th. From all accounts, it appears this will be a very busy term. A few of the cases to be heard are mentioned below:

• Another Federal Preemption Case: The Court will hear a case concerning whether a state court lawsuit over a federal employee’s health care benefits is preempted by federal law. The lawsuit was initially filed by Juli Pollitt, a government employee, against Health Care Service Corp.

• Guns: The Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms has never been held to apply to state and local laws restricting guns. The Court is taking up a challenge to a handgun ban in Chicago to decide whether this right, like many others in the Bill of Rights, acts to restrict state and local laws or only federal statutes. If the Court sides with gun rights supporters, lawsuits to overturn all manner of gun control laws are likely.

• Mutual fund fees: A fight over the fees paid to an investment adviser gives the Court a timely chance to weigh in on compensation paid to financial services executives. Individual mutual fund investors claim in a suit that they are paying unreasonably higher fees than institutional investors to the adviser who chooses their funds’ stocks. The Court could use this case to resolve disagreements among lower courts about whether Plaintiffs must prove merely that the fees are excessive or demonstrate that the adviser misled the mutual funds‘ directors who approved the fees.

• Honest services fraud: Newspaper baron Conrad Black and a former Alaska legislator separately are challenging their fraud convictions under an open-ended federal law that has become a favorite of prosecutors in white-collar and public corruption cases. The law says that depriving the public or, in Black’s case, shareholders of your honest services is a crime. Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out recently that, taken to its extreme, the law could be used to prosecute any employee who has ever called in sick to attend a ballgame.

• Vioxx suits: Merck & Co. shareholders sued the drug maker for securities fraud after its former blockbuster painkiller Vioxx was pulled from the market. The suit concerns whether Merck provided adequate information about Vioxx’s risks. But at issue before the Court is whether the shareholders waited too long to file their suits. The Court could use the case to decide what constitutes proper notice to investors under securities laws.

• Sarbanes-Oxley: The Court could decide the validity of a part of the Sarbanes-Oxley anti-fraud law, enacted as Congress’ response to the wave of corporate scandals that started with energy giant Enron’s collapse. The court is considering whether the board established to oversee the accounting industry by the 2002 law violates the constitutionally-mandated separation of powers between the branches of government. One irony of the case is that pro-business conservatives who are mounting the legal challenge are arguing that President Barack Obama should have more power to control the makeup of the board, while his administration is defending the law.

• Employment Cases: There will be a number of cases dealing with employment issues before the Court.

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