President Barack Obama has accelerated his search for his next Supreme Court nominee, meeting in the Oval Office with one of the candidates, federal judge Sidney Thomas of Montana, a person familiar with the conversation says.

Obama's meeting with Thomas on Thursday was his first known formal interview for the upcoming vacancy on the court. He is holding conversations with other candidates, and it is not clear whether he has already had other personal meetings with contenders.

Vice President Joe Biden interviewed Thomas at the White House in a separate meeting Thursday, said the person familiar with the conversations, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Obama's private deliberations.

The White House had no comment. A call to Thomas' chambers was not answered.

The personal time Obama devoted to Thomas suggests that the federal judge, well respected within legal circles but hardly a familiar name in Washington, is under a higher level of consideration by the president.

The news of his interview by the president and vice president works to the White House's advantage in signaling that Obama is giving a hard review to a candidate who comes from outside the Washington Beltway and does not neatly fit into conventional wisdom.

Another lawsuit has been filed against Winters Yonker & Rousselle, asking that it be forced to forfeit all attorneys’ fees for allegedly accepting unethical referrals from a for-profit referral service.

The complaint, filed Wednesday in Jefferson Circuit Court, asks that the suit be certified as a class action on behalf of all of the firm’s clients in Kentucky.

The suit was filed by James Rose and Christopher Rose of Elizabethtown, who says they hired the law firm after a motor-vehicle accident in May 2009.

The suit says that about two minutes after calling the 1-800-ASK-GARY referral line, Christopher Rose, James’ adult son, was contacted by as representative of Winters & Yonker, as the firm is now known, and instructed to meet him at 1st Physicians Rehabilitation Inc., a medical office in Louisville, where the law firm signed up the Roses as clients.

The suit alleges that the law firm obtained the referrals through “illegal and/or unethical solicitation,” and that attorneys fees collected by Winters & Yonker from the Roses and other clients should be forfeited. Kentucky lawyer ethics rules prohibit referrals in return for anything of value.

Suffolk University Law School plans to host a roundtable discussion on the effect of state budget cuts on the Massachusetts court system.

Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Margaret Marshall will be among the panelists Monday at the law school in Boston.

Other participants include Robert Mulligan, who's chief justice of the administrative office of the trial court; and William Leahy, chief counsel for the Committee for Public Counsel Services.

The roundtable discussion is sponsored by the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service, the New England Legal Foundation and the Boston Bar Association.

The Supreme Court by an 8-1 vote Tuesday struck down a federal law that makes it a crime to sell videos and other depictions of animal cruelty, saying the law infringed on free speech rights.

"We read (the law) to create a criminal prohibition of alarming breadth," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, noting that nowhere in the disputed law was there a requirement that the depicted conduct actually be "cruel."

The text of the law, used to prosecute a Virginia man who had advertised videos of dogfights in an underground magazine, sweepingly covered "any depiction" in which "a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed."

Yet as the justices struck down that prohibition, they specifically said they were not deciding the validity of a law that would target only so-called "crush videos," which typically show women's high heels digging into kittens and other small animals and which had inspired Congress to write the 1999 law in the first place.

Robert Stevens, who had run a business known as "Dogs of Velvet and Steel," appealed his conviction under the law, saying it violated his First Amendment speech rights. He also contended he was trying to provide educational and historical materials about the pit bull breed, not promoting illegal dogfighting.

It's been called a groundbreaking law, but a measure approved in Nebraska last week that changes the rationale for abortion bans probably won't go into effect anytime soon — if ever.

Instead, abortion opponents are hoping it will become the most important case on abortion to reach the U.S. Supreme Court in recent memory. Even they acknowledge the ban on abortions at and after 20 weeks of pregnancy won't see the light of day unless the high court rules that it is constitutional.

Mary Spaulding Balch, legislative director for National Right to Life, said a court injunction will likely prevent the implementation of the law. The measure passed last week by Nebraska's nonpartisan Legislature and signed into law by Republican Gov. Dave Heineman is scheduled to take effect in October.

Lower courts have no precedent to support the law, which bases the new restrictions on the assertion that fetuses feel pain.

Employers won a big victory Thursday in the ongoing fight over medical marijuana.

The Oregon Supreme Court ruled that employers no longer need to accommodate workers who legally use medical marijuana.

That means employers can terminate workers with medical marijuana cards who fail drug tests.

The ruling settled more than a decade of debate about the legal rights of employers when it comes to legal marijuana use.

“If a person shows a medical marijuana card, it’s no longer a get-out-of-jail-free card,” said Rich Meneghello, managing partner at the law firm Fisher & Phillips LLP, who represents employers.

Oregon voters legalized the use of medical marijuana in 1998. The law has been the subject of numerous legal challenges since then.