FACTBOX: Criminal, business cases await top U.S. court pick

(Reuters) - Juvenile justice, Guantanamo prisoners and online copyright are among pending cases that the next member of the U.S. Supreme Court will confront if approved by the Senate.

President Barack Obama is expected soon to name his choice to fill a vacancy created by the retiring liberal Justice David Souter, and the new judge is expected to be in place when the nine-member court returns to work in October after its summer recess.

The Supreme Court decides contentious social issues, like abortion and use of race as a factor in hiring and promotions, criminal law cases on the death penalty and high-stakes disputes involving corporations.

For its coming term that begins in October, the court already has a number of issues on the agenda. They include:

* whether a sentence of life in prison for juveniles who commit crimes other than murder violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The ruling could affect more than 2,500 individuals in the United States serving sentences of life imprisonment for crimes committed before they turned 18, human rights groups said.

The two Florida cases the Supreme Court will hear and decide involve a 13-year-old convicted of raping an elderly woman and a 17-year-old who took part in an armed home-invasion robbery while on probation for an earlier violent crime.

* whether a federal law that makes it a crime to sell videos of animals being tortured or killed violated constitutional free-speech rights.

The U.S. Justice Department defended the 1999 law that Congress adopted in an effort to crack down on videos like those depicting dog fights. It compared animal cruelty to child pornography, which the Supreme Court has said does not qualify for free-speech protection.

* whether to uphold an $18 million settlement between a group of publishers and freelance writers in a copyright case involving work included in online databases.

The writers sued the publishers and electronic database services, saying their contracts did not give the publishers the right to electronically reproduce their work or licence it for others to do so.

* whether to hear an appeal by Chinese Muslims who have been held for years at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and who want the Supreme Court to order their release into the United States.

The U.S. government has said it cannot return the members of the Uighur ethnic group to China because they would face persecution there. The case could be dropped if the Obama administration decides to free the 17 detainees in the United States or finds a country willing to accept them.

* whether to hear an appeal by two publishers of health care information arguing that data mining used for commercial purposes is protected by constitutional free-speech rights.

The case involved a challenge to a 2006 New Hampshire law that banned using information about a doctor's prescribing history for the purpose of increasing drug sales.

(Reporting by James Vicini; Editing by Eric Walsh)