Suits

Have you been bitten by a vicious dog? Been the victim of a surgical mishap? A sexual assault on a cruise ship? There's a lawyer waiting for your call. Boca Raton, Fla.-based firm WhoCanISue.com has scores of billboards and bus-shelter signs dominating the local landscape. The service matches website visitors with lawyers. Choose your complaint from a drop-down menu -- nursing home abuse, for example -- and then a sub-category, such as bedsores, dehydration or falls and fractures.

When Matt Vaughn was pulled over for speeding on Interstate 5 in Northern California early on a Sunday morning, he had a bag of marijuana on the passenger seat. The California Highway Patrol officer smelled the weed, searched the car, took the marijuana and pipe and gave Vaughn a sobriety test, which he passed. An angry Vaughn showed the officer his doctor's recommendation to use marijuana for glaucoma. The officer was unimpressed.

After a Lutheran school expelled two 16-year-old girls for having "a bond of intimacy" that was "characteristic of a lesbian relationship," the girls sued, contending the school had violated a state anti-discrimination law. In response to that suit, an appeals court decided this week that the private religious school was not a business and therefore did not have to comply with a state law that prohibits businesses from discriminating.

A classroom dispute at Los Angeles City College in the emotional aftermath of Proposition 8 has given rise to a lawsuit testing the balance between 1st Amendment rights and school codes on offensive speech. Student Jonathan Lopez says his professor called him a "fascist bastard" and refused to let him finish his speech against same-sex marriage during a public speaking class last November, weeks after California voters approved the ban on such unions.

Lingering fog shrouds the Venice boardwalk midday as Thomas Mundy rolls past ice cream vendors, T-shirt shacks and falafel stands, a discerning eye trained on the warrens of beach-themed kitsch and quick nibbles. He's not looking for leather thong pendants or Jamaican trinkets in memory of Bob Marley, or to commune with the manic crowd of in-line skaters and street artists.

Shin Jin-tae says he lives in the unluckiest town on Earth. During World War II, when the Japanese occupied Korea, thousands of residents of this small farming community were shipped to Japan to work in munitions factories. Their destination: Hiroshima. Shin and his family were there on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, when the U.S. military dropped the atomic bomb, leveling the city center and vaporizing many of those within a mile of the blast.

You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana state line if you're African American, but you might not be able to drive out of it -- at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables. That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime.

When married real estate agents Scott and Melinda Tamkin read about an episode of the hit crime drama "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" that featured dirty-dealing, S&M-loving real estate agents named Scott and Melinda Tamkin, they didn't need to consult a forensic expert for an explanation. A house sale involving the Tamkins and a "CSI" producer had fallen apart four years before, and the producer was listed, in the same online description, as the co-writer of the episode.

Ephram Nehme was gravely ill when Anthem Blue Cross of California agreed to pay for a liver transplant his physician said he needed to survive. Then, his condition went downhill fast. The news from his doctor was bad. The word from his insurer was worse. Nehme's doctor told him he could die waiting for an organ in California and urged him to go to Indiana, where the waiting list was shorter. But Anthem Blue Cross said no. It would not pay for a transplant in Indiana. Nehme, a Lebanese immigrant with a rags-to-riches story, could afford to buy himself a new lease on life and did -- going to Indiana and paying $205,000 for a liver transplant there.

The UC Board of Regents have quietly settled a dozen lawsuits stemming from fertility fraud uncovered nearly 15 years ago -- drawing closer to an end a scandal that has dogged UC Irvine and left behind dozens of heartbroken couples. Shirel and Steve Crawford recently deposited their $675,000 settlement, minus legal fees, but it brought them little peace. In the late 1980s, in the midst of what many consider the country's worst fertility scandal, the Crawfords believe their embryos were given to a woman referred to in documents as "Mrs.