Supreme Court

CASES TO BE HEARDSongs. The court, giving itself a chance to review some rap music, will rule on the legality of 2 Live Crew's "Pretty Woman," one of the song tracks on the album "As Clean As They Wanna Be." The 2 Live Crew version is a parody of "Oh, Pretty Woman," a rock 'n' roll song written by Roy Orbison and William Dees in 1964 and protected by copyright. A federal appeals court ruled that the parody probably violates the copyright. The Supreme Court will issue a final ruling in about a year.

At 3:30 p.m. last Friday afternoon, after days of trying to decide among the last three candidates on his list for the Supreme Court, President Clinton suddenly added a new name to the list -- Paul Sarbanes. The Maryland senator would no doubt be a good justice. Editorialists here have pointed out his qualifications more than once. Senate and House service, excellent legal education, etc.But the way to choose a justice is not as an afterthought, though that almost seems what President Clinton did last year, adding a finalist at the last moments of the process and then picking her.This year the process was even less commendable.

Could the 1992-1993 term of the Supreme Court, which began this week, be called its National Enquirer phase? It has a number of cases that offer good supermarket tabloid headline possibilities, but are less exotic than they sound and are probably of little consequence to most Americans.There's the Animal Sacrifices Case. The Sexual Therapy Case. The Innocent Man To Be Executed Case. The Pornographic Cache Destroyed Case. Everything but an Elvis Case.In the first, the court will be asked to decide if a religious group may be denied the right to sacrifice live animals in its rites.

The Supreme Court's just-concluded term was the most determinedly conservative in decades. Its core of three very conservative justices -- Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- were joined on most of the close, important decisions by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy. When the term began, those two moderate conservatives appeared ready to form a dominant centrist coalition with the court's liberal wing of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Clinton nominees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

Drunk-driving tests. The Supreme Court left intact yesterday a lower court ruling limiting police authority to use physical force to get a blood sample from a drunk-driving suspect who resists. A federal appeals court, in a Newport Beach, Calif., case, ruled that any time police use more than "reasonable" force on a suspect who is not cooperating, they have violated the suspect's privacy rights. The lower court abandoned an earlier standard allowing police to use any method short of one that "shocks the conscience" to get blood samples from suspects.

Supreme Court justices are so often cast as combatants in headlines (and, sometimes, in editorials) that it is easy to forget just how compatible they are over the course of a year. For example, in the term that ended last July, most justices voted with most other justices most of the time.There are exceptions. The most conservative justice, Clarence Thomas, voted with the most liberal, John Paul Stevens, 40 percent of the time, according to the annual statistical review of the term just published in the Harvard Law Review.

I interviewed Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer last year, and - let me put it this way - I can't think of anyone less qualified to replace Rush Limbaugh as a radio talk show host. Thoughtful, wise, a little dry and measured in his words, Justice Breyer seemed to be everything Americans should want in a judge. He betrayed no particular ideology during an hourlong conversation about the Supreme Court's role in our democracy. He politely refused to answer a question related to a case before the court.