Supreme Court to Take On Contentious Cases in New Term

Roberts's role on the court and the justices' decisions this term will be seen through the prism of the 2008 elections.

The justices themselves hate being lumped into groups: Roberts, Alito and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the right, Stevens and Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer on the left. They frequently point to areas of the law, such as sentencing, or to many business cases, in which opinions are often lopsided, or at least the usual alignments are scrambled.

But the great majority of last term's 5 to 4 decisions broke along those patterns, with Kennedy voting twice as often with the conservatives as with the liberals. And the end of the term was particularly fractious, with the four liberals taking turns reading sharp dissents from the bench.

"I think last June they were pretty happy to get away from each other," said Carter G. Phillips, a top Supreme Court practitioner at the law firm Sidley Austin.

Many Democrats and liberal activist groups are anxious to make the court's more conservative stance last year a theme for 2008, saying it is important to have Democrats in charge of the White House and Senate when the next vacancy on the court occurs.

But Thomas C. Goldstein, who heads Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld's Supreme Court practice, wrote a provocative post for ScotusBlog.com arguing that the controversial cases on the court's agenda this year might aid conservatives in making the court an issue.

"The leading cases will be ones in which the more liberal position is distinctly -- even profoundly -- unpopular with conservatives," Goldstein wrote. "Even if the left ultimately does not win all of the five most significant cases of this Supreme Court term, that wing of the court will carry the banner for accused terrorists, crack dealers, child pornographers, child rapists, and those who want to forbid gun possession."

And besides that, conservative activists -- wary of Kennedy's ability to side with either wing of the court, depending on the issue -- have never been as enamored of the court's work last year as liberals were outraged.

"It's a pretty good court," said John Choon Yoo, the former Justice Department official who was a leader in advocating the Bush administration's expansive view of presidential power in wartime. "But it's not everything promised."