Public disclosure of the names and addresses of signers of referendum petitions does not violate the First Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.

The California Supreme Court has carved out a narrow exception to one of its seminal arbitration rulings, provoking a fair amount of sniping between the majority and the dissent. The 4-3 majority opinion pokes a small hole in a key 1992 ruling that said arbitrators’ decisions, even if erroneous, can’t be judicially reviewed unless there is evidence of corruption or fraud. A dissenting judge accused the majority of making an “unsupported and unprecedented move to judicialize the arbitration process.”

Antitrust enforcers at the Justice Department collected a whopping $1 billion in criminal fines in fiscal year 2009, an increase of 48 percent over 2008. According to an analysis released this week by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the majority of the fines came in the first half of the fiscal year.

In a stinging dissent, a Manhattan appeals judge criticized a decision to cut almost in half a defendant’s 16-to-32-year prison sentence for masterminding a multimillion-dollar diamond scam. Justice Peter Tom wrote that the majority’s leniency was misplaced, considering the potential damage the defendant wreaked on the culture of trust in the diamond industry, where million-dollar deals are secured by only a handshake. Tom also emphasized the defendant’s decision to set up his own son as the fall guy for the scheme.