Clint Bolick

The Supreme Court intervened in the disputed Cleveland voucher case Friday and cleared the way for more students to receive state tuition subsidies to enroll in religious schools. The high court, acting on a 5-4 vote, overturned a federal judge's order that blocked new students from taking advantage of the voucher program while the Cleveland case moves through the courts. The emergency order sends another strong signal that the court's conservative majority believes vouchers are constitutional.

Hoping to preserve a "race-conscious" system of awarding federal contracts, the Clinton administration said Tuesday that it will try to use statistics to show that blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans are unfairly excluded from obtaining government work.

The Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge Monday to a Wisconsin law that gives low-income parents up to $5,000 per year for private or parochial schooling in Milwaukee, a move likely to encourage "school choice" efforts in several other states. On an 8-1 vote, the justices dismissed appeals from the nation's teachers unions and the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued that such direct state aid for religious schools violates the Constitution's separation of church and state.

President Clinton nominated Deval L. Patrick, a Boston lawyer with extensive civil rights experience, on Tuesday to head the Justice Department's civil rights division--a position that has been vacant for nearly a year. Conservatives, who led a successful fight against Clinton's first choice, University of Pennsylvania professor C.

Los Angeles lawyer Bill Lann Lee, President Clinton's choice to be the federal government's chief civil rights enforcer, received a surprisingly warm reception Wednesday from the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee.

Backing away from an earlier, rigid insistence on a separation of church and state, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that public school tutors can again enter parochial schools to provide remedial teaching to low-income children. The 5-4 ruling will save public school systems--mainly those in large cities--nationwide a total of $15 million a year. Since 1985, the schools have spent that money on mobile vans that were placed outside parochial schools.

The American public by a slight margin now favors using public money to pay at least part of the cost of sending children to private or religious schools, according to a national poll released this week. At the same time, a large majority says that the most crucial reforms in education involve strengthening existing public schools.

The Supreme Court ordered up wine and beef Monday, not for a grand meal but rather to decide two disputes that have divided the agriculture industry in California and across the nation. In the first, the court will rule on whether small wineries may ship directly to out-of-state consumers. The wineries and some of their most devoted customers are challenging Prohibition-era laws that allow states to control all alcohol that crosses their borders.

The Supreme Court announced Monday it will hear a challenge to Arizona's public funding of state campaigns, setting the stage for a ruling that could doom efforts to limit the impact of private money in elections. The court's decision next year will be the latest in a series of campaign-funding law rulings, in which the conservative majority has struck down both state and federal laws while saying that that free speech calls for free spending in politics. In January the justices struck down the 63-year-old federal law that barred businesses and unions from funding election ads. Good-government reformers have held out the hope that taxpayer funding of campaigns could keep candidates focused on the interests of ordinary voters, rather than on the special interests of their big donors.

The Clinton Administration, in a switch from the government's earlier position, said Tuesday that an employer can lay off a white worker and retain an equally qualified black worker to preserve the "diversity" of its work force. In a legal brief filed in a federal appeals court, the Justice Department came to the defense of a New Jersey school district that had used that reasoning in 1989 when it dismissed a white high school teacher while preserving the job of a black teacher.