JIM LEHRER: Today’s three major Supreme Court cases are first tonight. The biggest decision may have been not to hear a case involving First Lady Hillary Clinton. The issue was attorney-client privilege and centered on notes of conversations between presidential lawyers and Mrs. Clinton. NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor of the American Lawyer and Legal Times is here for the details. The case began when, Stuart?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: It began, well, it goes back for years in terms of negotiations between Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and the White House over whether you could have certain documents, but it came to a head last summer when the White House decided to draw a line in the sand and say you may not have these notes of conversations between the First Lady and White House lawyers because they are protected by the attorney-client privilege, and Starr said, no, they’re not and subpoenaed them and precipitated the court battle which ended today.

JIM LEHRER: And the appeals court ruled–which the Supreme Court agreed with today–that they were not protected by attorney-client privilege. Now, we don’t know–we’ll get to that in a minute–we don’t know what the Supreme Court–

STUART TAYLOR: The Supreme Court didn’t exactly agree with it.

JIM LEHRER: Didn’t exactly agree, but the ruling that they were judging was the appeals court, so what did the appeals court say for turning down the White House lawyers’s appeal on this?

STUART TAYLOR: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled very broadly in an opinion by a Reagan appointee named Pasco Bowman in April, and it was just unsealed in May, that the attorney-client privilege never protects any conversation any government lawyer has with the President, the First Lady, or anyone else against a federal grand jury subpoena.