Roberts court will face big choices early

The case most likely to result in a 4-4 deadlock with O'Connor breaking the tie involves a challenge to a 2003 New Hampshire law that requires teens seeking an abortion to notify a parent.

The issue in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England is whether the same tough constitutional standards established in earlier abortion cases should be applied to invalidate the New Hampshire law.

A federal judge and a federal appeals court panel struck down the notification law because it created an "undue burden" on teenagers seeking abortions. They also said it did not provide an adequate exception for cases in which a woman's health might be threatened unless she received an abortion.

In appealing, the New Hampshire attorney general argues that the law allows a teen to by-pass the regulations by going directly to a judge. That process provides adequate safeguards to protect a woman's health, the attorney general says.

In essence, New Hampshire is launching a frontal assault on the methods that have made it easier to challenge and strike down abortion regulations than other kinds of laws. Lawyers for the state argue that abortion laws should be examined by the courts under the same constitutional standard as are most other laws.

If the high court embraces this argument it would open the door for significant new regulation of abortions at the state level while making it increasingly difficult to challenge such laws.

O'Connor has played the key role in upholding the so-called "undue burden" standard. Her departure from the court is expected to leave the justices divided 4-4 on the issue.

A decision in the Ayotte case could set the stage for an even more significant abortion battle over the constitutionality of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. The Bush administration recently asked the high court to examine a decision by the Eighth US Circuit Court of Appeals striking down the law for lack of an adequate health exception.

Another potential 4-4 split could arise in US v. Georgia. The case involves an Americans With Disabilities Act lawsuit filed by a paraplegic state prison inmate, Tony Goodman. He alleges that because of his disability he was being held in a high-security, lock-down wing of the prison in a cell so small he was unable to turn his wheel chair around.

Those conditions, his suit charges, meant he could not use the toilet and was thus forced to sit for extended periods in his own waste. Georgia countered by claiming that Congress overstepped its authority in attempting to hold the state liable under a federal law that treads upon Georgia's sovereign immunity.

The case is significant because it will help clarify whether the court is prepared to extend its states' rights line of cases or step back from earlier decisions.

The court has also agreed to decide two major campaign-finance cases that could leave the justices sharply divided. One challenges Vermont's mandatory limits on campaign spending as being a violation of a fundamental aspect of the high court's landmark 1976 ruling in Buckley v. Valeo. The other case challenges the ban on corporate issue ads in the McCain-Feingold law. The Supreme Court upheld the law in 2003.

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