ASHINGTON, July 3 - Although it has been 10 years since its membership last changed, the Supreme Court that concluded its term this week was, surprisingly and in important ways, a new court.

The change was most evident in the term’s closing days, in the cases the court decided on the rights of the detainees labeled enemy combatants by the Bush administration. The court ruled that foreigners imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as American citizens held in the United States are entitled to contest their classification before an impartial judge.

The surprise lay not in the outcome: it was scarcely a great shock, except perhaps to the administration, that a court preoccupied in recent years with preserving judicial authority would reject the bold claim of unreviewable executive power at the core of the administration’s legal arguments. Rather, what was most unexpected about the outcome of the cases was the invisibility of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. It is too soon to say for sure, but it is possible that the 2003-2004 term may go down in history as the term when Chief Justice Rehnquist lost his court.

It is a remarkable development. Since his promotion to chief justice 18 years ago, his tenure has been notable for the sure hand with which he has led the court, marshaling fractious colleagues not only to advance his own agenda but also to protect the court’s institutional prerogatives.

Four years ago, for example, the court reviewed a law by which Congress had purported to overrule the Miranda decision, a precedent Chief Justice Rehnquist disliked and had criticized for years. But in the face of Congress’s defiance, he wrote a cryptic opinion for a 7-to-2 majority that said no more than necessary about Miranda itself but found common ground in making clear that it was the court, not Congress, that has the last word on what the Constitution means.

This year, there was every reason to suppose the chief justice would want to shape the court’s response to the war on terrorism. His 1998 book on the history of civil liberties in wartime reflected his extensive knowledge and evident fascination with the subject by which the term, if not his entire tenure, was likely to be known. If there was a message to be delivered from one branch of government to another, Chief Justice Rehnquist figured to be the one to deliver it.

Yet the Guantánamo case found him silently joining Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion as Justice John Paul Stevens explained for the 6-to-3 majority why the federal courts have jurisdiction to review the status of the hundreds of foreigners detained there. In the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, the American-born Saudi taken from the battlefield in Afghanistan and held since 2002 in a military prison, Chief Justice Rehnquist was among the eight justices who found the open-ended detention improper for either constitutional or statutory reasons. But his was not among the several voices with which the court spoke. He was a silent member perhaps even a late-arriving one of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s plurality opinion.

The implication is not that Chief Justice Rehnquist, who turns 80 on Oct. 1, has lost a step. Nor does he show any interest in leaving the court, which he joined in 1972 at the age of 47. A few days ago, in fact, he hired law clerks for the term beginning in October 2005, and some people believe he is aiming to top the record of 36 years set by Justice William O. Douglas, or at least to equal the 34-year tenure of his judicial hero, Chief Justice John Marshall.

Rather, it appears that while he has stood still, the court’s center of gravity has moved away from him. One statistic is particularly telling. There were 18 cases this term decided by five-member majorities (17 were 5-to-4 decisions and one, the Pledge of Allegiance case, was 5 to 3 but would surely have been 5 to 4 had Justice Scalia participated; he would certainly have agreed with Chief Justice Rehnquist, in the minority, that the court should rule that “under God” posed no constitutional problem). Of the 18 cases, Chief Justice Rehnquist was in the majority in only eight.

That contrasts sharply with the chief justice’s notably successful term two years ago, when he was in the majority in 15 out of 21 5-to-4 decisions. A year ago, he was in the majority half the time, in 7 out of 14 cases with 5-to-4 votes, and was on the losing side in the most important of those cases, the decision that upheld affirmative action at the University of Michigan. He was also on the losing side in the Texas gay rights case, in which the court voted 6 to 3 to overturn the state’s criminal sodomy law.

Those were the first stirrings of what accelerated during the term that began Oct. 6. The chief justice was in dissent in most major cases, from the expedited ruling in December that upheld major provisions of the new campaign finance law, until the two decisions last Tuesday,June 29 the term’s final day, blocking enforcement of an Internet pornography law and taking a generous view of federal court jurisdiction under the Alien Tort Statute to hear foreign human rights cases. Also this week, he dissented from the court’s refusal to authorize a police interrogation tactic designed to induce suspects to confess despite receiving their Miranda warnings. Further, the Rehnquist court’s federalism revolution, with its expansive approach to state sovereignty and correspondingly limited view of Congressional power, appeared this term to stall in its tracks. The chief justice was on the losing side in the term’s major federalism case, the 5-to-4 decision in Tennessee v. Lane rejecting state immunity from suit under a provision of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

A number of other cases had federalism overtones that a majority of the court either rejected or ignored. In the case that struck down the sentencing guidelines in the state of Washington, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy objected in dissent that the court was failing to give the states proper respect for their legislative choices on criminal justice. Chief Justice Rehnquist also dissented in that case, which although less than a week old has already left criminal sentencing in turmoil around the country. Opponents of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law objected on state’s rights grounds to limits on the fund-raising abilities of political parties at the state level. In upholding the law, over Chief Justice Rehnquist’s dissent, the court barely acknowledged the federalism argument.

The chief justice tried and failed to use a Pennsylvania redistricting case this term to overturn a 1986 precedent, to which he had strongly objected at the time, that gave courts authority to review claims of partisan gerrymandering. While there were five votes to reject the particular gerrymander complaint, one of the five, Justice Kennedy, refused to go along completely, instead writing a concurring opinion that kept the prospect of a successful gerrymander suit alive for future cases.

The court decided 73 cases with full opinions during the term. Of the major cases, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion in two. One was the third of the terrorism detainee cases, that of Jose Padilla, an American arrested at O’Hare International Airport on suspicion of being part of a terrorist plot, who has been held in a military prison for the last two years without access to court. The decision postponed resolution of the case by holding that Mr. Padilla’s lawyer should have filed his habeas corpus petition in South Carolina rather than in New York.

The second of the chief justice’s major opinions came in an important church-state case, Locke v. Davey. The question was whether a state that underwrites college scholarships for secular study must also subsidize students who want to study for the ministry. The argument for the religious subsidies built on Chief Justice Rehnquist’s opinion for the court two years ago in a school voucher case from Ohio, holding that it did not violate the Constitution for states to give parents vouchers for religious school tuition as part of a general "school choice" plan.

As a practical matter, the future of the school-choice movement depended on the answer to the question that Locke v. Davey brought to the court: if vouchers were permissible, were they also constitutionally required? Writing for a 7-to-2 majority, the chief justice’s answer was no. “The state has merely chosen not to fund a distinct category of instruction,’’ one that was “not fungible’’ with ordinary secular studies, he said over biting dissents from Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Largely overlooked in the drama of the term’s higher-profile cases, Locke v. Davey was an important decision, indicative of the struggle now going on within the court over how far to push some of the principles that the conservative majority has established over the last 10 years or so.

In this instance, although the consequences of turning permissible vouchers into required vouchers would have been profoundly unsettling, the court’s recent insistence on an equal place for religion at the public table provided at least a plausible basis for that outcome. Instead, the majority looked at the consequences of carrying the recent precedents to their logical conclusion, and stopped short.

In fact, as Locke v. Davey demonstrates, the most consequential debate on the court today may be not so much over first principles, but over how far to carry those principles. That the chief justice was so often on the losing side this term may not mean that those who once agreed with him have changed their minds, but that they disagree over what to do next.

In Locke v. Davey, the stopping point appeared clear to a broad majority of the court. In the Tennessee federalism case, by contrast, while the chief justice wanted to continue pressing the boundaries of state sovereignty to immunize the state from a lawsuit by a man who could not reach a second-floor county courtroom in his wheelchair, Justice O’Connor decided that Tennessee v. Lane was not the case in which to push sovereign immunity to its logical conclusion.

The outcome was reminiscent of the court’s decision a year ago in the Michigan affirmative action case. Justice O’Connor, long skeptical of all official policies that take account of race, joined Justices Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter, and Stephen G. Breyer to uphold the law school’s admissions plan, essentially on the ground that diversity was good for the country. Pragmatism rather than doctrine seems to be the order of the day at the court now, strengthening the position of pragmatists like Justice Breyer and Justice O’Connor. Justice O’Connor, perhaps the court’s leading pragmatist, cast only five dissenting votes during the entire term, far fewer than anyone else, and was in the majority in 13 of the 18 most closely decided cases, more often than any other justice. She formed strategic alliances with other justices, for example writing an unusual joint opinion with Justice Stevens that upheld the central portions of the campaign finance law.

Justice Stevens displayed his own strategic skills, finely honed during a 29-year tenure that has made him the senior associate justice, in a position to assign the majority opinion in all cases where the chief justice is in dissent. He tailored his majority opinion in Tennessee v. Lane to Justice O’Connor’s comfort level, for example, and crafted a procedural opinion that removed the highly sensitive Pledge of Allegiance case from the court’s docket with surgical precision, leaving no precedent behind. At 84, his intellectual energy appears undimmed, and he told a gathering of his former law clerks a few weeks ago that he has no retirement plans.

So when the new term begins on Oct. 4, the same justices will reassemble for a highly unusual 11th year together. The juvenile death penalty and medical marijuana are among the cases already on a docket that may continue pushing these nine people, so familiar to each other, in new directions.

Following are summaries of the term’s major decisions. (Some of the vote counts are judgment calls; an opinion labeled by its author as a “concurrence” may be counted as a dissent, for example, if it departs from the essential elements of the majority opinion.) Detainees

Rejecting the Bush administration’s claim of unreviewable presidential authority in its war on terrorism, the court ruled that both citizens and noncitizens held in open-ended detention, in the United States and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to challenge their designation as “enemy combatants” before a federal judge or other “neutral decision maker.”

The decisions left unanswered many important questions about what procedures will satisfy the court’s standards, and what will happen next.

In the Guantánamo decision, Rasul v. Bush, No. 03-334, the court held by a vote of 6 to 3 that the United States naval base in Guantánamo Bay is within the jurisdiction of the federal courts, entitling hundreds of foreign detainees to file petitions for habeas corpus. Justice Stevens wrote the opinion. Justice Scalia wrote a dissent, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Thomas. The court ruled by a divided 8-to-1 majority in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, No. 03-6696, that the two-year detention of a United States citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, is invalid, for any of several reasons. Justice O’Connor, along with Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Kennedy and Breyer, said that Mr. Hamdi, picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan, had a due process right to a “meaningful opportunity” to contest the factual basis for his detention. Justices Souter and Ginsburg found that Congress had never authorized Mr. Hamdi’s detention in the first place. Justices Scalia and Stevens said the government must either try Mr. Hamdi for a crime, with the normal protections accorded to a criminal defendant, or release him unless Congress itself suspends the right to habeas corpus. Only Justice Thomas said the detention “falls squarely within the federal government’s war powers” and therefore holds up against any argument.

A second United States citizen, Jose Padilla, arrested at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago and now confined in the same naval brig in Charleston, S.C., as Mr. Hamdi, must file a new lawsuit in federal district court there as the result of the court’s 5-to-4 ruling in Rumsfeld v. Padilla, No. 03-1027. The federal courts in New York, where Mr. Padilla was initially held and where his lawyer filed a habeas corpus petition in June 2002, lacked jurisdiction, the court held in an opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist. Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissented.

Politics Two cases had important implications for the political system.

In one, the court upheld the new federal campaign finance law by a vote of 5 to 4, rejecting arguments made by the Republican National Committee and a coalition of business, labor and lobbying groups that the law’s restrictions on contributions and advertising violated the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. Experience with the flood of unregulated money into politics amply justified the new law, the majority said.

The justices worked hard to expedite the decision, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, No. 02-1674, managing to hand it down in early December as the 2004 campaign season got under way. By then, the provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, usually referred to as McCain-Feingold for its Senate sponsors, had been in effect for 13 months and the system was already adjusting to the ban on unlimited contributions of so-called soft money to the political parties.

Justices Stevens and O’Connor co-wrote the main opinion, joined by Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer. Justice Kennedy wrote the main dissent, criticizing the majority’s definition of corruption as unduly broad. Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas also dissented.

The second case raised the question of whether the federal courts should intervene in a redistricting dispute to correct a partisan gerrymander. The case was from Pennsylvania, where the Republican-controlled Legislature redrew the state’s Congressional district to squeeze out several Democratic incumbents.

The court was deeply split. Four justices Scalia, O’Connor, Thomas and Chief Justice Rehnquist said in a plurality opinion by Justice Scalia that partisan gerrymander cases did not belong in federal court because there was no standard that judges could apply to evaluate them. Justice Kennedy provided a fifth vote for rejecting the Democrats’ constitutional claim in this case, Vieth v. Jubelirer, No. 02-1580, while indicating that a future case could be so extreme as to violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer and Ginsburg said the courts should be open to such cases, although they did not agree on what standard to apply.

Criminal Law

Continuing the revolution in criminal sentencing that the court launched four years ago, a 5-to-4 decision striking down Washington State’s sentencing guideline system threw federal sentencing into turmoil, indicating the need for a quick resolution of the validity of the federal guidelines. The court ruled that under the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of trial by jury, judges cannot be permitted to make the factual findings that increase a defendant’s sentence beyond the usual range for the crime. Juries must find such facts “beyond a reasonable doubt,” Justice Scalia wrote for the court in Blakely v. Washington, No. 02-1632.

As in earlier rulings in this line of cases, the unusual majority included Justices Stevens, Souter, Thomas and Ginsburg. Justices O’Connor, Kennedy and Breyer dissented, as did Chief Justice Rehnquist.

At the same time, the court refused to give retroactive application to a 2002 ruling that invalidated the death penalty laws of Arizona and four other states for permitting judges to make the factual determination that placed a convicted murderer in the category of those eligible for the death penalty. The 5-to-4 decision in Schriro v. Summerlin, No. 03-526, returned as many as 100 inmates to the five states’ death rows. Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion. Justices Breyer, Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg dissented.

The court strengthened the constitutional right of criminal defendants to confront the witnesses against them, ruling 9 to 0 that prosecutors cannot introduce statements from an absent witness on tape, for example unless the defense has had a chance to cross-examine the witness at an earlier hearing or a previous trial.

This decision replaced the court’s previous, more flexible approach, which often favored the prosecution. Justice Scalia wrote for the court in Crawford v. Washington, No. 02-9410, that the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause gives defendants the right to face their accusers, with few exceptions.

With Justice Kennedy making the difference, the court reached opposite results in two cases on the consequences of a failure by the police to read suspects their Miranda rights. In Missouri v. Seibert, No. 02-1371, the court rejected a police tactic of withholding the warnings during an initial phase of questioning in order to induce an initial, inadmissible confession that the suspect can then be persuaded to repeat after receiving the warnings. The second confession is not admissible either, the court ruled in an opinion by Justice Souter. Justice Kennedy voted in the majority, as did Justices Stevens, Ginsburg and Breyer.

The second case, United States v. Patane, No. 02-1183, permitted the police to introduce physical evidence discovered as the result of statements from a suspect who did not receive Miranda warnings. Justice Thomas wrote an opinion for himself, Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia that was noticeably hostile to the Miranda precedent. Justices O’Connor and Kennedy did not go so far, but they agreed with the outcome in this particular case.

In two Texas death penalty cases, the court issued unusually pointed rebukes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which sits in New Orleans and has jurisdiction over federal court appeals originating in Texas. The justices in both cases found that the appeals court had failed to follow Supreme Court precedent in refusing writs of habeas corpus to death-row inmates: Delma Banks, who presented extensive evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, and Robert J. Tennard, whose lawyers argued that he had been blocked from presenting his low I.Q. as mitigating evidence.

The decision in Banks v. Dretke, No. 02-8286, was 7 to 2, with a majority opinion by Justice Ginsburg and dissenting votes from Justices Thomas and Scalia. The vote in Tennard v. Dretke, No. 02-10038, was 6 to 3, with a majority opinion by Justice O’Connor and dissenting votes from Justices Thomas and Scalia and Chief Justice Rehnquist.

Privacy

The court ruled unanimously that release of the death-scene photographs of Vincent W. Foster, the Clinton administration’s deputy White House counsel, would be an unwarranted invasion of the privacy of his surviving family members. Mr. Foster committed suicide in 1993. Alan J. Favish, a lawyer who disputed the finding of suicide, sought the photographs under the Freedom of Information Act. His “bare suspicion” was not enough to justify the intrusion, Justice Kennedy said for the court in National Archives v. Favish, No. 02-954.

The court divided 5 to 4 on another privacy question, ruling against a Nevada rancher, Larry D. Hiibel, who argued that he could not constitutionally be required to identify himself to a law enforcement officer. The court held in Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court, No. 03-5554, that the police are entitled to obtain the name of someone they suspect might be involved in a crime, even in the absence of the probable cause necessary to make an arrest. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion. Justice Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissented.

Discrimination

Addressing sexual harassment in the workplace, the court set guidelines for the first time for evaluating an employer’s liability for working conditions that become so intolerable as to induce a reasonable employee to resign. Speaking for an 8-to-1 majority, Justice Ginsburg said an employer could ordinarily defend itself by showing that it had adequate procedures in place for reporting harassment and the employee had failed to use those procedures. But if a supervisor or manager had taken official action against the employee a demotion or reduction in pay, for example as part of the harassment, that defense would not be available, the court said in Pennsylvania State Police v. Suders, No. 03-95. Justice Thomas dissented.

Interpreting the federal law against age discrimination in employment, the court ruled 6 to 3 that the statute is not a two-way street: it protects those whose employers think they are too old, but not those who are disfavored for being too young. A group of younger workers had sued General Dynamics over changes in retirement health benefits that hurt those under 50 while protecting older workers. The court said the law should be understood in the context of Congress’s intent to protect older workers. Justice Souter wrote for the majority in General Dynamics Land Systems v. Cline, No. 02-1080. Justices Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy dissented.

Federalism and Regulation

Ruling narrowly, the court held that states could be sued under the Americans With Disabilities Act for failing to make their courthouses accessible. The law requires accessibility for a broad array of public services and programs, but Justice Stevens’s opinion for a 5-to-4 majority confined itself to the plight of wheelchair users in Tennessee who were barred by architectural barriers from entering county courthouses. Whether states can claim immunity from suit in other applications of the disability law remains to be seen in future cases.

Limited as it was, this decision, Tennessee v. Lane, No. 02-1667, was significant as a break from past decisions rejecting Congressional efforts to overcome the states’ constitutional immunity from suit. The majority said Congress was justified in this context by a well-documented history of the exclusion from state judicial proceedings of people with disabilities. Chief Justice Rehnquist dissented, along with Justices Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy.

In a major health care case, the court ruled unanimously that federal law barred the states from extending to patients in managed care the right to sue for damages when a health maintenance organization refuses to cover treatments that a doctor has deemed medically necessary. Congress alone can decide whether to enact a “patients’ bill of rights,” the court said in Aetna Health Inc. v. Davilla, No. 02-1845. Justice Thomas wrote the opinion.

The court affirmed the authority of the federal Environmental Protection Agency over state regulators in a Clean Air Act case from Alaska. The dispute in Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 02-658, was over which agency had the final word in setting conditions for expansion of a zinc mine. Voting 5 to 4, the court upheld the federal regulators’ authority to set stricter conditions. Justice Ginsburg wrote the opinion. Justice Kennedy dissented on federalism grounds, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas.

Speech and Religion

In an opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist, the court ruled that states that subsidize college tuition for secular studies are not constitutionally obliged to also subsidize students who are preparing for the ministry. The case rejected the claim of a ministry student to equal access to a Washington State scholarship for which he would have been eligible if not for the state’s own constitutional ban on public financing of religious institutions.

The vote in Locke v. Davey, No. 02-1315, was 7 to 2, with Justices Scalia and Thomas dissenting. Similar constitutional barriers against subsidizing religious study exist in most states and stand in the way of an expansion of the tuition voucher programs the court upheld in a case from Ohio two years ago. The question raised by the new case was whether states must include religious schools in “school choice” programs as a matter of the free exercise of religion. More generally, does exclusion of religious institutions from a general public benefit automatically amount to discrimination? The court’s answer was no.

A dispute over the constitutionality of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance ended inconclusively when five justices held that the atheist who complained about the recitation of the pledge in his daughter’s elementary school classroom lacked standing to bring the lawsuit. Justice Stevens said for the majority that Michael A. Newdow’s lack of legal custody of his daughter, coupled with the desire of the child’s mother to have her continue reciting the pledge, meant that the lower courts should have refrained from deciding the case.

Justices Souter, Kennedy, Ginsburg and Breyer joined the majority opinion in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, No. 02-1624, which took no view on the constitutional merits of the lawsuit. Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Thomas and Justice O’Connor wrote separate opinions addressing the merits and finding the pledge constitutional. Justice Scalia recused himself from the case after having expressed his view before the appeal reached the court that “under God” was constitutional. The court rejected Congress’s latest effort to curb children’s access to sexually explicit material on the Internet. But the 5-to-4 decision in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, No. 03-218, left open the prospect that the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 might yet survive a federal district court trial if the Bush administration can show that the voluntary use of filters would not be as effective as the law’s stiff criminal penalties in achieving the goal of protecting children. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, Thomas and Ginsburg.

Jurisdiction

Several cases this term posed novel questions about the jurisdiction of the federal courts to resolve disputes over events that took place outside the country’s borders.

Interpreting a 215-year-old law, the Alien Tort Statute, the court kept federal courthouse doors open to lawsuits by foreigners who say they were victims of serious human rights violations anywhere in the world. The 6-to-3 decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, No. 03-339, left many unanswered questions about the full reach of the statute. Justice Souter wrote for the majority. Justices Scalia and Thomas and Chief Justice Rehnquist dissented.

The court ruled that the heir of an Austrian Jewish art collector could pursue a lawsuit in federal court against Austria for the return of six valuable paintings seized from the family during the Nazi era. The 6-to-3 decision interpreted a jurisdictional statute, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, to apply to conduct predating its enactment in 1976. Justice Stevens wrote the majority opinion in Republic of Austria v. Altmann, No. 03-13. Justice Kennedy wrote a dissenting opinion that Justice Thomas and Chief Justice Rehnquist signed.

The court limited the foreign reach of federal antitrust law, ruling that the Sherman Antitrust Act does not apply to transactions that take place in foreign countries unless the defendant’s actions in the United States can be shown to have contributed to the anticompetitive effects felt overseas. The 8-to-0 decision came in a private suit for damages in an international conspiracy to fix vitamin prices. Justice Breyer wrote the opinion in F. Hoffman-LaRoche Ltd. v. Empagran S.A., N0. 03-724. Justice O’Connor did not participate.

A case involving Vice President Dick Cheney had intensely political overtones but turned, as a legal matter, on arcane issues of federal court jurisdiction. The underlying question was whether groups suing the vice president to get information about contacts between his energy policy task force and energy company executives could undertake pretrial discovery in their effort to establish that a federal open-meetings law applied to the task force.

For the Supreme Court, however, the only question was whether a federal appeals court properly interpreted a jurisdictional statute when it refused to block the pretrial discovery. Voting 7 to 2, the justices found that the appeals court had acted “prematurely” when it refused the vice president’s request to block discovery. The decision, Cheney v. United States District Court, No. 03-475, gives the vice president a second chance at shielding the information. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority. Justices Ginsburg and Souter dissented.