Narrow Victories Move Roberts Court to Right

"Someone like Ginsburg, who used to be a cautious liberal, is now an angry liberal," said Neil S. Siegel, a professor of law at Duke University and a former law clerk of Ginsburg's.

And the liberals' dismay has been evident even in what might otherwise have been relatively minor, technical cases. On June 14, Thomas announced a 5 to 4 ruling in which the conservatives said that a convicted murderer could not pursue an appeal because he had missed a filing deadline, even though his attorney had relied on a judge's erroneous assurance that he had enough time.

"It is intolerable for the judicial system to treat people this way," Souter wrote. The majority could reach its result, he said, only by overruling two little-known cases from the 1960s.

As Roberts read his opinion in the schools cases yesterday, Breyer shifted in his chair, rubbed his temples and occasionally shook his head. When his turn came to read his dissent, Breyer spoke heatedly for almost a half-hour, much longer than the chief justice himself had taken to read his opinion.

The 77-page opinion, twice as long as any other dissent Breyer has written, clearly occupied much of Breyer's time and energy during the term.

As his liberal colleagues have done in their dissents, Breyer accused Roberts and the conservatives of violating stare decisis, the legal principle that decisions should generally be left undisturbed.

"The majority is wrong," Breyer said. "It's not often in law that so few have changed so much so quickly."

The charge of ignoring or twisting precedent stings, because it is essentially an accusation that the conservatives have abandoned the judicial restraint that they so often preach, in pursuit of policy results they favor.

And Roberts, who pledged "judicial modesty" and respect for precedent in his 2005 confirmation hearings, has responded, defending his rulings as applications of the court's existing doctrine.

In the campaign finance case, he argued that past rulings permitted the court to entertain challenges to specific applications of McCain-Feingold and that his decision to permit a Wisconsin antiabortion group's television ad was consistent with case law that barred regulation of all ads except those that expressly advocate the election or defeat of a particular candidate.

Yesterday, Roberts peppered his opinion with phrases such as "under our existing precedent" and "the established law." He also frequently buttressed his arguments with quotations from the writings of O'Connor, as if to emphasize that his views were well within the court's historical mainstream.

"I thought Roberts was trying to wrap himself in Sandra Day O'Connor," said David J. Garrow, a senior fellow at the University of Cambridge, England.

Roberts also responded in kind to Breyer, arguing that his dissent "alters or misapplies our well-established legal framework" and that his "appeal to stare decisis rings particularly hollow."