WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 (UPI) -- Chief Justice William Rehnquist began the new term of the Supreme Court Monday with a startling slip of the tongue.
Speaking from the bench, the chief justice declared "that the October 2001 term is now closed, and the October 2002 term is now convened."
At that point, it's customary for the chief justice to make announcements about personnel changes.
Rehnquist said he had "the honor of announcing the retirement of the chief justice --" before catching himself abruptly and correctly announcing the retirement of the "chief deputy clerk Frank Lorson."
The chief justice, of course, had no intention of announcing his own retirement, as court employees later confirmed.
But his slip presaged what may become the main topic of speculation for the media during the upcoming term -- which, if any, of the court members will announce his or her retirement at the end of it.
The question is of intense political interest in Washington. The court regularly divides along its 5-4 ideological fault line on a number of issues, including affirmative action, and any replacement of a justice might shift the narrow conservative majority to an equally narrow liberal majority.
A Supreme Court vacancy might also set off a political battle in the Senate, where Democrats control by one vote -- for now -- and President Bush's judicial nominees for the lower courts have sometimes been blocked on ideological grounds.
Another area that might make this term of the court a particularly contentious one is the aftermath of the investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
In a number of venues, civil libertarians, representing aliens caught up in the investigation, have challenged Justice Department policies put into place since the terror attacks.
Those policies include keeping immigration hearings secret and refusing to release the names of illegal aliens being held.
Late last September, at Attorney General John Ashcroft's urging, chief immigration judge Michael Creppy issued a memo requiring that immigration hearings "of special interest" be closed to the public.
The policies also include a government claim that it can hold a handful of U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants," and keep them in detention indefinitely with no access to a lawyer.
The challenges are slowly making their way through the trial and appeals courts, and should be on the Supreme Court's doorstep by next winter or spring.
Though it heard arguments Monday and Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear the first new-term case of truly national interest Wednesday.
In Wednesday's case, the court has agreed to decide if Congress exceeded its power when it brought U.S. copyright law into conformity with the laws of the European Union in 1998.
Previously, U.S. copyrights protected a work during the life of the author and for 50 years thereafter.
The Copyright Term Extension Act, however, extended the terms of existing U.S. copyrights by another 20 years.
The "copyright clause" of the Constitution gives Congress the "power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
The key to the clause is the phrase "limited times."
Challengers to the 1998 extension say Congress has lengthened copyright protection way beyond the "limited" range conceived by the Founding Fathers.
If the Supreme Court ultimately agrees with the challengers -- a prospect by no means certain -- popular movies such as "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone with the Wind" will suddenly lose copyright protection.
Many of the works of Robert Frost, Agatha Christie, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and many others would belong to the public, not the writer's estates.
Mickey Mouse would become part of the public domain.
