Momentous issues on the horizon for Roberts era; Nation's 17th chief justice faces "hot-button constitutional issues" that promise to leave lasting imprints on American way of life.
The Buffalo News
September 30, 2005

Now that John G. Roberts Jr. has been confirmed as the nation's 17th chief justice, he faces a series of big cases in the next few months and a docket that's likely to touch the lives of tens of millions of Americans in the next few decades.

This term alone, the Supreme Court will decide whether states are going too far in trying to restrict abortion and in trying to lure business across state lines. The justices also will determine whether the federal government went out of bounds when it attached strings to federal funding and tried to prevent physicians from assisting suicide.

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The Buffalo-born, Harvard-educated Roberts is the first new chief justice in 19 years. And with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor set to retire as soon as President Bush names and the Senate confirms a successor, the high court could soon find itself with two first-year justices for the first time since 1972.

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The court is expected to decide its first major abortion case in five years, involving New Hampshire's requirement that teenagers give their parents 48 hours' notice before ending a pregnancy. And after that, either this term or next, the justices are likely to consider whether the federal ban on late-term abortions is constitutional.

The question in both cases is likely to be whether those laws are what O'Connor has called "undue burdens" to abortion. That has been the standard used to judge such laws, and a more conservative court might want to revise it, said Lucinda M. Finley, a pro-choice law professor and vice provost for faculty affairs at UB.

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