Miranda rights to prayer, court to decide key cases

Monday, 20 March 2000

http://www.azstarnet.com/public/dnews/080-6815.html

© 2000 The New York Times
WASHINGTON - With more than three months to go in its term, the Supreme Court today enters a concentrated period of unusual intensity and potential import.
The justices, back from a brief recess, will begin six weeks of hearing arguments in one blockbuster case after another, a series of high-profile appeals that appear drawn from today's headlines and that have already marked the term as a likely landmark.
These questions suggest the scope of what awaits the justices among the two dozen cases they will hear between now and the last week in April, the final building blocks of the 1999-2000 term:
Does public prayer before a high school football game violate the separation of church and state?
Are the Miranda warnings still required before the police can interrogate a suspect in custody, or has Congress effectively overruled the 34-year-old Miranda decision?
Can states put into effect their own views of foreign policy by withholding state business from companies that trade with disfavored regimes.
Can states, and by extension Congress, criminalize the surgical procedure that abortion opponents call ``partial-birth abortion''?
Do the Boy Scouts have a constitutional right to exclude gay youths and men from leadership roles?
These cases and more are all due for decision by the end of June, the court's goal for resolving all argued cases and finishing its term.
``It's just an amazing term, with no major area of constitutional law that doesn't have the potential for major change,'' Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at the University of Southern California, said in an interview. Noting the high-profile nature of the court's docket, he continued: ``I wonder whether the magnitude of this term, the prominence of these cases, will have the effect of making the court more salient as an election issue.''
Given that some major cases that were argued three, four or even five months ago remain undecided as this new round of arguments begins, the prospect of an orderly, on-time conclusion to the term strikes many people who follow the court as wishful thinking.
The justices have all but complete control over which cases to accept but relatively little control over the timing, generally considering new appeals in the order in which they were filed. So the unusual concentration of high-profile cases for the March and April arguments simply reflects the fact that most of them reached the justices' desks during the fall.

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