Warren Court

WASHINGTON -- Frustration has been a remarkably persistent theme in recent observances of the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. It is frustrating for those who thought that Brown would end all school segregation to see a half-century later that, lo and behold, racial separation in schools persists. Of course, this time it's different. Economically segregated neighborhoods lead to economically -- and often racially -- segregated schools.

CLARENCE THOMAS said, "My most vivid childhood memory of the Supreme Court was the 'Impeach Earl Warren' signs which lined Highway 17 near Savannah."I remember those signs vividly, myself. I also remember Thomas' neighborhood, E. 32nd Street, next to the railroad tracks. His grandfather built their house with his own hands and $600 worth of material. Tom Coffey, a columnist for the Savannah Morning News, recently informed me of that and jump-started my memory of the time and place.E. 32nd Street wasn't quite as bad as it sounds, but it was a pretty unlikely place for a black kid to start out from for the Supreme Court or any other such success.

Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, occupies a peculiar position in the pantheon of American conservative heroes. Most conservatives celebrated Judge Bork as the champion of constitutional values who was denied his rightful position on the Supreme Court by liberals bent on warping constitutional language for partisan purposes. Constitutional conservatives for the past 25 years, however, have gone on precisely the sort of judicial crusade that Judge Bork condemned in his major writings. While Judge Bork and such contemporary justices as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas share a superficial commitment to constitutional originalism, the originalism of the conservatives on the present Supreme Court bears little relationship to the originalism Mr. Bork pioneered during the 1970s and 1980s.

WASHINGTON -- Overturning a precedent of the Warren Court era, the Supreme Court effectively has shut the door on an important route of federal court appeals for state prison inmates.By a 5 to 4 vote, the court ruled yesterday that federal courts are no longer obliged to grant a hearing on a state prisoner's challenge to his conviction, even if the prisoner can show that his lawyer had not properly presented crucial facts of the case in a state-court appeal.Until yesterday, federal courts handling such challenges through habeas corpus petitions from state inmates were required to hold a hearing to evaluate evidence if facts central to the case had not been presented adequately to the state courts.

The legal dueling at the O.J. Simpson hearing this week has focused on whether certain evidence against him could be suppressed under the "exclusionary rule." That rule says evidence gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment ("search and seizure") can be excluded from a trial. Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell's ruling yesterday that the evidence can be used could determine whether Mr. Simpson goes to trial. A similar ruling at a trial would almost surely be the subject of appeals.This is fueling public debate about the wisdom of the exclusionary rule.

Allen Case, a founder of Case-Mason Inc. in Joppa, died Dec. 15 at the Shock-Trauma Unit in Baltimore of a brain aneurysm. He was 64 and lived on Warren Manor Court in Cockeysville.As an organ donor, Mr. Case helped three other patients.Services for Mr. Case were held Dec. 18 at the Church of the Redeemer, with burial in Green Mount Cemetery.A native of Quincy, Mass., Mr. Case was a 1945 graduate of the St. Paul's School for Boys and then attended Johns Hopkins University, where he joined the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.

Washington. -- On most aspects of public policy, Bill Clinton and others have done a great job of ''repositioning'' -- as they say in the ad biz -- the Democratic Party. On foreign policy, the party is no longer perceived as a bunch of weak-kneed appeasers. On domestic policy, the party has shaken off its image of a mindless propensity to ''tax and spend.''In one area, though, Democratic Party thinking has not changed much. That is its attitude toward judges and the proper use of the Constitution.

Jerry Miller reached a milestone this week, but I'm willing to bet it's one he'd prefer didn't involve him at all. Miller was arrested as a suspect in the kidnapping, rape and robbery of a Chicago woman in 1981. He was convicted in 1982, sentenced to 45 years and paroled in 2006 as a registered sex offender. Miller had to wear an electronic monitoring device, couldn't answer his door for Halloween trick-or-treaters or leave his job when he took a lunch break. Then DNA testing intervened.

THE "TAKINGS" clause of the Fifth Amendment is for conservatives what the "equal protection" clause of the 14th is for liberals. It wouldn't be fair to say that conservatives cherish property the way liberals cherish equality. But it would be fair to say that the "takings" clause is the conservative recipe for judicial activism - imposing their agenda through the courts, rather than bothering with democracy - the way they say liberals have misused the equal protection clause. Of course, conservatives always claim to be against judicial activism.

SOMEONE who knows that I write most of The Sun's Supreme Court editorials asked me if I wrote"Ginsburg for the Supreme Court"I said, no, I wrote"Mr. Justice Breyer"Here's what happened. As I was preparing to go on a mini-vacation last Friday afternoon, reporting from Washington indicated that Judge Stephen Breyer was about to be named to the Supreme Court. It was practically a done deal. President Clinton would make it official late Friday or Saturday.Joe Sterne, the editorial pages editor, and I discussed the nominee Friday morning and the ways and means of getting an editorial in the papers immediately after the announcement.