SUPREME COURT FACES CONTROVERSIAL SLATE : ASSISTED SUICIDE PROMISES TO BE DIVISIVE ISSUE FOR JUSTICES.

Byline: Aaron Epstein Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Opening a potentially dynamic term Monday, the nine Supreme Court justices will confront several hot-button issues likely to drive them apart and trigger controversy nationwide.

Not since the bitter debates over abortion have the justices faced a question of such depth and breadth as doctor-assisted suicide. Having explored the beginning of life in the abortion cases, they now must focus on the end.

The outcome would affect millions of Americans and - together with rulings on such other subjects as English-only laws, gun control, voting rights and the president's vulnerability to lawsuits - could yield clues to the lingering mystery of where the court is heading.

And before long, the court may leap into other impassioned disputes, such as federal restrictions on gays in the military and ``indecency'' on the Internet.

In cases like these, when the stakes are highest and the issues most sensitive, the court's three conservatives and four moderate-to-liberal justices usually diverge.

That places decision-making power in the hands of the two justices at the court's center: Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy. Last term, no 5-4 majority came together without Kennedy, O'Connor or both.

The Supreme Court has not surfaced as a major campaign issue, but the outcome of the presidential election next month could alter the court's delicate balance by the turn of the century.

Many court analysts expect one to three court vacancies during the next four years. Speculation centers on the possible retirements of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 72, and Justices John Paul Stevens, 76, and O'Connor, 66, although they appear to be vibrant and in good health.

A re-elected President Clinton could push the court to the left if the conservative chief justice or O'Connor departs. Bob Dole, as president, could nudge it to the right by filling a seat vacated by Stevens, a liberal.

For now, though, lawyers appearing before the justices must deal with a high court that is difficult to pigeonhole or predict. To be sure, it is a conservative court - seven of the nine justices were named by Republican presidents - but it is not dogmatically conservative and, indeed, sometimes reaches liberal results.

Still, two evolving trends merit special attention.

First, government remedies based on race - such as affirmative action, racial balancing in schools, and political redistricting to benefit minorities - are highly suspect and likely to be struck down. This trend will resurface in several voting rights cases now before the court.

Second, centralized power in Washington will be curbed if it is seen to be invading the constitutional turf of states and local governments. The new term offers several new opportunities for the court to prune federal power, including a constitutional challenge to a law regulating the purchase of handguns.

To A.E. Dick Howard, a University of Virginia law professor and a longtime analyst of court trends, this 207th year of the Supreme Court is a period of fundamental re-examination of some previously accepted principles.

``Beginning three or four terms ago, the court showed a willingness to reopen old questions,'' Howard said. ``They began to take a new look at issues thought long settled - such as race-based remedies, and state and local problems that the court very generously allowed Congress to solve in the past.

``But if the court is taking a new look at these longstanding principles, so is the country,'' he said. And so is Congress. It recently gave states vast new power to run their own welfare programs with federal money.

Unquestionably, the top story of the coming term will be about life and death.

Whether a terminally ill patient, who is entitled to reject life-prolonging medical treatment, also has a right to hasten death with the help of a doctor is a question with profound legal, medical, ethical, moral and theological implications. They range from the duty of physicians to the meaning and quality of life itself.

``Each of the justices has his or her own set of beliefs and they will have to face death in their own way,'' said Joseph J. Frank, a Miami lawyer for the Catholic Medical Association, one of dozens of organizations preparing to file briefs in the two assisted suicide cases before the high court.

``But they will try to keep those things out of their minds and be dispassionate jurists and interpret the Constitution. They can't allow their own fears and prejudices to influence them,'' said Frank, who holds a doctorate in philosophy and once trained to be a priest.

Another case of broad interest questions the validity of an Arizona constitutional amendment that would make English the official language for all government activities within the state.

Unless the case falters on its daunting procedural hurdles, it will challenge the court to resolve a dispute of concern to the millions of U.S. residents who speak a foreign language at home, as well as millions of others who are troubled by the recent influx of immigrants.

How the justices rule may depend on whether a majority of them perceive such a language restriction as merely an instruction by government on how its employees should speak on the job - or more broadly as a repressive law generated by animosity toward speakers of Spanish, Navajo or other non-English tongues.

Laws seen as irrationally targeting or excluding specific groups are unlikely to survive. Last term, the justices scrapped Colorado's constitutional amendment barring gay-rights laws and ended the historic exclusion of women at all-male military colleges.

A different sort of perception is involved in the question of whether President Clinton can delay a lawsuit filed against him by Paula Jones, the woman who accuses him of sexual harassment when he was governor of Arkansas. That case would force the justices to look at the essence of the presidency itself.

Is it a position so uniquely demanding that its occupant needs to be shielded during his term of office from suits based on his unofficial conduct? Or is it unjust and unnecessary to place a president ``above the law'' and immune to such suits?

The ongoing exploration of the relationship between federal, state and local governments will resume in several cases. In one of them, local officials attack the legitimacy of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which requires a five-day waiting period and background check before handguns may be purchased.

The size of the court's docket has been shrinking in this decade. During the term that ended in July, the justices wrote signed opinions in 82 disputes, the lowest amount in more than 30 years and far below the 140-per-year average of the 1980s.

The court is accepting cases at a similar rate this year. Increasingly, the justices allow lower court decisions to stand, even as larger numbers of cases arrive at their doorstep.