US: Recent moderate rulings by the Supreme Court bring the law moreinto line with popular opinion, writes Conor O'Clery.
When the US Supreme Court voted to stop the count in Florida and give the 2000 election to George W. Bush, and later went on to uphold state-funded vouchers for religious school education, many liberals wrote it off as a conservative institution with a Republican bias.
However, a series of moderate rulings in the last days of its current term which brought the law more into line with popular opinion have stunned conservatives and delighted liberals.
The Supreme Court was feted in gay rights parades held across the US on Sunday for liberalising gay sex, while in Washington, Republican Senate majority leader Mr Bill Frist accused the justices of making the home a sanctuary for criminal activity.
In half a dozen important rulings, which will impact on US legislation and social behaviour, the nine-member court championed racial diversity in higher education, overruled states' sovereignty on gender equality, and in a 7-2 decision, overruled a death sentence on a man whose troubled childhood was not made known to jurors.
It ruled that the Democratic Party's strategy of distributing black voters more evenly during redistricting to give Democrats a better chance of winning did not violate existing law.
In its most talked-about decision, the court backed gay rights, and erased one of its most-criticised precedents, the 1986 Bowers v Hardwick decision upholding state sodomy laws.
In its 6-3 gay rights ruling, the justices knocked down anti-sodomy laws that intruded into the privacy of the bedroom, a decision that has the effect of preventing a majority in a state from imposing its notions of sexual morality on a minority.
This has particularly upset religious fundamentalists who fear it will lead to the legalisation of gay marriages, something which is about to be enacted in neighbouring Canada.
Religious broadcaster Mr Pat Robertson condemned the decision, which he said would take the nation "down into a moral sewer" and Senator Frist, who claimed the ruling could encroach on the zone of criminality in the home, said he will now support a proposed constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage in the US.
A draft proposal now before a House Judiciary subcommittee would amend the constitution to define marriage as only the union of a man and a woman.
The proposal faces formidable hurdles, as it must be approved by two-thirds of the House and the Senate and ratified by three-fourths of the states. However, the issue of gay marriages could become an embarrassing litmus test for Democratic candidates in the 2004 election.
With seven of the justices appointed by Republican presidents, there was widespread expectation that the court would strike down affirmative action which is opposed by many Republican groups, but in a 5-4 decision it upheld the consideration of race by universities in their admissions policies, while barring quotas.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate conservative, joined the more liberal justices to swing the vote, writing that the use of race to bring a "critical mass" of blacks, Latinos and native Americans to university campuses did not harm the interests of whites.
The court did not totally abandon its conservative instincts. In what the New York Times called a callous decision, it declined to accept a challenge to California's "three-strikes and-you-are-out" law from a prisoner jailed for 50 years for stealing $150 worth of video-tapes.
Justice O'Connor, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, again provided the swing vote in this case but on the conservative side. However, she then cast the decisive vote in upholding a source of legal funds for the poor that had been challenged by conservatives as a subsidy for left-wing lawyers.
In all 13 of the term's 5-4 decisions, Justice O'Connor was in the majority, making her one of the most powerful individuals in the US. Usually Supreme Courts are named after the Chief Justice but this court is becoming known as the "O'Connor Court".
In most of the cases she decided she joined with the court's four liberals - Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer - to oppose strong conservative trends.
When taken together, the decisions amounted to "a strong term for traditional civil rights," said Mr Steven Shapiro of the American Civil Liberties Union.
In almost all decisions, three justices, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, maintained a hard right position. With the strong possibility that a judge will retire before the end of Mr Bush's term in 2005, the Senate is gearing up for what could be a vicious struggle over confirmations to a finely balanced court.
Mr Bush said his ideal choice for a Supreme Court judge would be someone like Mr Scalia, who is opposed to abortion and is possibly the most right-wing judge on the panel.