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∙ RELIGION: Far from being irreligious, the Court has been extending the First Amendment's church-state separation to accommodate the rise of U.S. religious diversity. In the late '40s, it ruled that tax-paid bussing of parochial schoolchildren and some public-school released-time programs are permissible because they do not involve the state in the actual teaching or support of religion. The recent ban on public-school prayers drew the line at state-enforced religious exercises in order to protect the country's nonbelievers. The alternative would have been for the Court to pass on every school prayer, thus further secularizing religion. Teaching about religion, if not of religion, is still permitted.
∙ CRIMINAL JUSTICE: In a 1949 decision, the Court allowed states to accept or reject the "exclusionary rule," based on the Fourth Amendment, which bans evidence obtained by unreasonable search and seizure. But then came 1961's Mapp v. Ohio, ordering all states to obey the rule that even if illegally seized evidence shows guilt the defendant may be freed because the police violated the Constitution. Far less controversial: 1963's Gideon v. Wainwright, which overturned the conviction of Florida Indigent Clarence Earl Gideon, applies the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel to all defendants in state criminal courts. Overriding precedents going back to 1908, the Court last year said that under the Fifth Amendment a state cannot compel a person to testify against himself.
∙ REAPPORTIONMENT: Plunging into what Frankfurter warned was a "political thicket," the Court has tackled the anomaly of rural minorities' controlling legislative majorities in at least 40 states. To give every citizen's vote equal weight, the Court ruled last June that under the 14th Amendment, every house of every state legislature must be apportioned on the basis of districts "as nearly of equal population as is practicable." Can one house of a bicameral legislature be organized on a nonpopulation basis to reflect minority interests? No, says the Court, because such a house might veto majority interests. Even so, the order does not preclude two different kinds of houses. As long as both are "substantially" based on population, they can differ in numerical size, length of terms, district size and district delegation (single-member or multimember). One house can also balance off "minor inequities" in the other's geographical representation. The Court does not expect "mathematical precision" but does demand reasonably frequent reapportionment, say every ten years.
Arming the Union. The reasoning by which the Court arrived at such state-taming decisions is rooted in the burgeoning nationalization of a country that was first united only by the Articles of Confederation, a compact so loaded in favor of the 13 independent-minded states that Congress could not tax, regulate commerce or conduct foreign relations. Only for the sake of national survival did the states by 1789