Among the issues that went to court: The presidency, Elian's fate and music copyrights

larger   The U.S. Supreme Court decided two cases that helped decide the 2000 presidential election.

By Raju Chebium
CNN.com Writer

(CNN) -- It was a year unlike any other in legal terms. This year there was no months-long celebrity murder trial or battle over a U.S. Supreme Court appointment. Instead, people looked to the courts to address new and complex matters as pressing as who would be the next president of the United States, as sensitive as where a 6-year-old boy should call home, as novel as how to apply longstanding principles of antitrust and copyright law to new technology.

The vote for U.S. president was so close on November 7 that it took 36 days and much legal wrangling before George W. Bush could assume the title president-elect.

With Florida's 25 electors in the balance, the mother of all legal battles ensued with Bush and Gore lawyers and individual voters fighting it out on multiple fronts in state and federal courts.

IN-DEPTH   •  Reviewing the Vote   •  Microsoft v. Justice   •  Copyright in the Digital Age   •  Lockerbie Bombing Trial   •  U.S. Supreme Court    FULL TEXT   •  Boy Scouts of America and Monmouth Council et al., Petitioners v. James Dale Decision (Findlaw)   •  Case Briefs (Findlaw)   •  New Jersey Supreme Court Decision (Rutgers)

The Gore team said it wanted a "full and fair" recount of ballots cast in counties where it alleged there were problems. The Bush team said statewide machine recount was sufficient.

More than a month after Election Day, the matter finally peaked before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case aptly named Bush v. Gore. In a 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was unconstitutional. By that time, the clock had run out on the deadline for selecting presidential electors and Al Gore conceded defeat, clearing the way for a Bush presidency.

Florida was the scene of another riveting legal drama -- the saga of young Elian Gonzalez. The Cuban boy arrived in South Florida on Thanksgiving Day 1999. His mother drowned in trying to flee Communist Cuba with her son.

The boy's great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, applied for Elian's political asylum in January. But the 6-year-old boy's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, insisted on the boy's return to Cuba. U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said the boy's father speaks for the boy, ordering Elian returned to his homeland. His father came to the United States to get custody of his son.

Lazaro Gonzalez unsuccessfully sued the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and Reno in federal courts. The boy returned on July 28 after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Lazaro Gonzalez's request for an asylum hearing on the boy's behalf.

In a seizure that grabbed headlines around the world, Reno authorized armed federal agents to forcibly remove Elian from his relatives' home after Lazaro Gonzalez refused him over.

Trial began in May for two Libyans accused of committing one the world's worst acts of airline terrorism -- the bombing of Pam Flight 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The trial is taking place in a special Scottish court in The Netherlands.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah are accused of causing the deaths of all 259 people on board; 11 people also died on the ground. Investigators determined that explosives slipped in a Toshiba cassette recorder caused the blast. Scottish prosecutors have painted the two men as terrorists. The suspects say they are innocent. The trial continues.

The future of the online music industry became a key issue in this year's cases against Napster Inc. and MP3.com, two Web sites that allow users to download free music.

The music industry alleged the sites made it possible for millions of people to violate copyright law. The Web sites argued they did nothing wrong because they did not directly violate copyright law. Napster allowed users of its system to dip into one another's hard drives to share music. MP3.com allowed users to download music onto MP3 players, thus making the songs portable.

MP3.com shut down its service in April after a New York federal judge found that the site violated copyright law, then reopened it several months later under a fee-based model. The Napster case has yet to go to trial.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Boy Scouts of America may exclude gays from troop leader positions, a ruling denounced by gay rights advocates.

The Scouts have the First Amendment right to decide matters involving its membership, the court said in overturning a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that the dismissal violated state's anti-discrimination law.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in the majority opinion: "We are not, as we must not be, guided by our views of whether the Boy Scouts' teaching with respect to homosexual conduct are right or wrong."

The U.S. Department of Justice won a landmark antitrust case in June, persuading a federal judge to break up the world's largest software company, saying it illegally perpetuated its monopoly power in the market.

In June, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered the company split in two after finding that it competed unfairly to protect a monopoly in its Windows operating system. The judge also ordered other remedies, but delayed them until all appeals are completed. Jackson ruled Microsoft violated the Sherman Act, which seeks to protect consumer choice by curbing businesses from getting so big that they stifle competition.

The U.S. Supreme Court in October rejected a bid by Microsoft to quickly consider the case, bypassing the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Antitrust experts expect the nation's highest court to take up the matter after customary appeals routes have been exhausted.