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The article reports on the new rules announced by the Federal District Court in Manhattan, New York that will make judge assignments to cases more transparent and random.

Lawyers routinely battle each other, representing the conflicting interests of plaintiffs and defendants. But lately in the vast tangle of federal litigation over last year's Deepwater Horizon oil spill, lawyers on the same side -- for the plaintiffs -- are fighting one another. The current conflict pits members of the steering committee and their allies against a dissident faction of lawyers, many of whom are looking to settle their cases before trial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Score one for the screenwriter. A United States District Court judge in Los Angeles has dismissed a lawsuit by an Iraq war veteran, Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver, that claimed the film ''The Hurt Locker'' was based on him without his permission and that he had suffered ridicule because of it and was denied employment. Sergeant Sarver sued Mark Boal, who wrote ''The Hurt Locker,'' a few days before the film won the Oscar for best picture at the 2010 Academy Awards and Mr. Boal took home a trophy for best original screenplay. Mr. Boal was embedded with Sergeant Sarver's unit in 2004 as part of an assignment for Playboy and wrote about him and other bomb disposal experts in the resulting article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

CORRECTION APPENDED ON Feb. 2, 2004, Marlo Kidd awaited sentencing before Judge Denny Chin of Federal District Court in Manhattan. She had pleaded guilty to acting as a lookout for two masked gunmen who had robbed a bank in Yonkers, and under federal sentencing guidelines, she faced a prison term of up to six years. Her lawyer, though, was asking the judge to sentence her only to home confinement, because she was raising five children who ranged in age from 5 to 13, and also caring for her 14-year-old sister, as their own mother had been a crack-cocaine addict. He had said that sending Ms. Kidd to prison would almost certainly result in her children being placed in foster care, destroying what was left of the family. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

DELAYED TRIAL A federal judge on Thursday pushed back by a week the trial of Raj Rajaratnam, below, who has been accused of being at the center of an insider trading network. The trial, which was scheduled to start on Feb. 28, will now begin on March 8, according to the order from Judge Richard J. Holwell of United States District Court in Manhattan. He gave no reason for the postponement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The proceedings in the Senate on Tuesday were as remarkable as the charges that lawmakers there were asked to weigh. As tax policy debates swirled around the Capitol, the Senate on Tuesday began pondering the fate of Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. of Federal District Court in Louisiana, whom the House of Representatives impeached in March on four articles of ''high crimes and misdemeanors'' stemming from charges that he received cash and favors from those with business in his court. This is only the 12th impeachment trial of a judge in Senate history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Obama administration's efforts to suspend deepwater oil drilling were dealt another setback in court on Thursday when the federal judge who struck down the administration's six-month moratorium refused to delay the decision's effects. . The Interior Department petitioned Judge Martin L.C. Feldman of the United States District Court in New Orleans to grant a stay of his decision, which lifted a ban on new drilling projects and on work on the 33 rigs already in place in the Gulf. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A House committee has endorsed impeachment charges against a federal judge accused of sexual assault and lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The House Judiciary Committee voted 29 to 0 to approve four articles of impeachment against Judge Samuel B. Kent, who serves on a United States District Court in Texas. That sends the charges against him to the full House for a vote. Judge Kent, 59, is scheduled to go to prison June 15 to serve a 33-month sentence. He pleaded guilty last month to lying to a federal court of appeals investigative committee about sexual assaults involving two female employees. He told President Obama last week that he did not intend to resign as a judge until June 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]