When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take Bobby Chen's case involving a run-down Baltimore row house razed by the city, it looked past the fact he was too poor to pay the court's filing fee and had no attorney. But now Chen can't be found, something unheard of at the nation's highest court.

The Supreme Court agrees to take less than 1 percent of the roughly 10,000 petitions it receives every year, but it was even rarer for the court to take a case like Chen's. On average, the court takes just 10 petitions a year like his, in which the party making the request is too poor to pay the court's $300 filing fee.

But since the court agreed to take Chen's case in November, he hasn't surfaced. Dec. 22 was Chen's deadline to mail his main legal brief in the case. The court hadn't heard from him as of Tuesday, said Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg.

The court's Clerk's Office, which corresponds with parties who have a case before the court, has tried to reach Chen by letter and email. But it's not clear he got the messages, Arberg said. And he didn't list a phone number when he asked the court to take his case. The Associated Press also tried to reach Chen by email, but the message bounced back as undeliverable. Efforts to find a telephone number were also unsuccessful.

Lawyers will argue Wednesday whether a man accused of pushing his wife off a cliff to her death in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park as they celebrated their wedding anniversary should remain in jail.

The federal detention hearing comes after Harold Henthorn, 58, was indicted last week on a charge of first-degree murder in the death of Toni Henthorn, 50.

An autopsy report says she fell or was pushed over the ledge when she paused to take a photo during a hike on Sept. 29, 2012. The couple was visiting the park for their 12th wedding anniversary.

Only after her death did Toni Henthorn's relatives realize she was covered by three life insurance policies totaling $4.5 million. A claim was sent in for one policy days after she died, court records show.

Harold Henthorn's attorney, Craig L. Truman, has said that the case is complicated and that "justice will be done" once the facts come to light.

Virginia's practice of automatically holding death row inmates in solitary confinement will be reviewed by a federal appeals court in a case that experts say could have repercussions beyond the state's borders.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria ruled last year that around-the-clock isolation of condemned inmates is so onerous that the Virginia Department of Corrections must assess its necessity on a case-by-case basis. Failure to do so, she said, violates the inmates' due process rights.

The state appealed, arguing that the courts should defer to the judgment of prison officials on safety issues. A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments Tuesday.

The lawsuit was filed by Alfredo Prieto, who was on California's death row for raping and murdering a 15-year-old girl when a DNA sample connected him to the 1988 slayings of George Washington University students Rachel Raver and Warren Fulton III in Reston. He also was sentenced to death in Virginia, where he has spent most of the last six years alone in a 71-square-foot cell at the Sussex I State Prison.

Some capital punishment experts say a victory by Prieto could prompt similar lawsuits by death row inmates elsewhere.

"It gives them a road map," said northern Virginia defense attorney Jonathan Sheldon, who noted that the due process claim succeeded where allegations of cruel and unusual punishment have routinely failed. "It's not that common to challenge conditions of confinement on due process grounds."

In seemingly contradictory voting-rights actions just a month before November's elections, the Supreme Court has allowed new Republican-inspired restrictions to remain in force in North Carolina and Ohio while blocking Wisconsin's voter identification law.

But there's a thread of consistency: In each case, the court appears to be seeking a short-term outcome that is the least disruptive for the voting process.

Another test of the court's outlook on voter ID laws could come from Texas, where the state is promising to appeal a ruling that struck down its strict law as unconstitutional racial discrimination.

None of the orders issued by the high court in recent days is a final ruling on the constitutionality of the laws. The orders are all about timing — whether the laws can be used in this year's elections — while the justices defer consideration of their validity.

In some ways, these disputes over the mechanics of voting are like others that crop up frequently just before elections as part of last-minute struggles by partisans to influence who can vote.

Republican lawmakers say the measures are needed to reduce voter fraud. Democrats contend they are thinly veiled attempts to keep eligible voters, many of them minorities supportive of Democrats, away from the polls.

Court rulings at various levels have also revealed partisan divisions. Most judges who voted to uphold the restrictive laws or allow them to take effect while the legal fights play out are Republican appointees. Most of those voting to strike down the laws or prevent them from being enforced were appointed by Democratic presidents. That is true even at the Supreme Court.

The high court has laid out one area of agreement: a general rule discouraging courts in general from letting potentially disruptive changes take effect at the last minute.

"The idea that courts should not impose a new set of voting rules just before an election is not a new one," said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine law school.

This year, that idea appears to have led the Supreme Court to outcomes that on the surface appear to be inconsistent, Hasen said. One problem in reading too much into the orders is that they were issued with little explanation.

But in each case, the court took issue with lower court rulings that would have changed the rules too close to an election, Hasen said.

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a North Carolina case over whether U.S. states can delegate the regulation of professions such as dentistry, plumbing, cosmetology and more to boards of practitioners drawn from those occupations.

The issue set for a hearing before the justices Tuesday is whether state-established boards such as those for dentists, veterinarians, doctors and cosmetologists can regulate their occupations without fear of running afoul of federal antitrust laws.

The specific case before the court involves a 2007 decision by the North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners warning operators of teeth-whitening kiosks in malls and tanning salons that they were practicing dentistry without a license. The Federal Trade Commission has said that state's dental board engaged in unfair competition in the market for teeth-whitening services.

"Almost everyone from a plumber to the best heart surgeon in the country is affected by one of these boards. Anyone who uses their services is affected by these boards," said Lisa Soronen, executive director of the State & Local Legal Center. That group represents public officials from governors to city council members.

The number of occupations that set educational requirements and other qualifications for work in a field ranges from dozens to hundreds, depending on the state. The issue is becoming increasingly important as more jobs in the growing service sector require licenses.

The Indiana Court of Appeals has determined that state utility regulators wrongly approved $61 million in ratepayer fees for the Edwardsport coal gasification plant.

Duke Energy is seeking the money to cover construction costs for the new plant. But Appeals Court Judge James Kirsch wrote in an opinion issued Monday that members of the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission should have better analyzed arguments from Duke Energy and plant opponents before approving the fee increase.


Duke officials have said a three-month delay led to increased project costs. But opponents led by the Citizens Action Coalition have argued that IURC regulators have been "rubber-stamping" fees and a rate hike sought by Duke.

The case is one of many surrounding the Edwardsport plant that is locked in battle inside the Indiana courts.