Civil rights in court spotlight

WASHINGTON -- When the Supreme Court returns to the bench Monday for the second half of its annual term, justices will hear several cases that could make this the most important session for civil rights law in years.

These cases will further shape the court under Chief Justice John Roberts, which will end its third full session this summer.

"At the beginning of this term in October, I don't think many people thought it would be shaping up to be as significant as it is now in terms of civil rights cases," says Columbia University law professor Theodore Shaw, a former counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Among cases the justices will take up:

• A "reverse discrimination" claim that arose when a Connecticut city rejected results of a civil service test for firefighter promotions because whites scored disproportionately higher than blacks.

• A major voting rights dispute over whether the Department of Justice may still oversee state electoral law changes based on the states' history of bias after the nation elected its first African-American president.

• A long-running Arizona dispute over whether the state spends enough money to provide English-language classes for non-native speakers under U.S. education rules.

The justices' docket will present several other high-profile disputes, including one on when elected state judges should be disqualified from cases involving their big donors.

The court had been tentatively scheduled in March to hear the case of a Qatari citizen arrested in Peoria, Ill., and placed in a U.S. military prison as an "enemy combatant." The case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri challenges the president's authority to seize someone suspected of conspiring to engage in terrorism in the USA and lock him up without the usual due process of law.

The Obama administration obtained more time from the court to assess how to proceed with the case.

Congress and the White House are controlled by Democrats, so a court dominated by justices who lean to the right could emerge as the last bastion of conservatism, says Stanford University law professor Jeffrey Fisher, who argues regularly before the court. "Will the justices say, 'We should heed the winds of political change?' " he says, "Or will they say, 'It's even more important to protect certain conservative principles that are not popular right now?' "