No corner of the law, it seems, is too arcane to become a front in the ideological battle between liberals and conservatives over the federal judiciary.

Witness the hot debate developing over the extent to which courts should use legislative history as a guide to interpreting acts of Congress.

A few years ago, this subject could hardly have warmed the heart of a fledgling law professor scrounging for a tenure piece. Now, with the rise of a new conservative jurisprudence, the tectonic plates underpinning the law may be starting to move.

The longstanding consensus that courts should discern congressional intent through liberal use of legislative history-committee reports, floor debate and the like-is breaking down. And the issues now surfacing could be "of enormous consequence, in a vast number of cases," in the words of Justice Antonin Scalia.

He is the philosophical leader of a movement to focus almost exclusively on the meaning of the statutory text in interpreting legislation and to reduce or even abandon judicial reliance upon legislative history.

In several opinions Justice Scalia has assailed what he considers the profligate use by courts in recent decades of staff-written legislative history-which he has called "judicial abdication to a fictitious legislative intent."

His approach is sometimes called "textualism." Warning that "the textualists are on the march," Chief Judge Patricia Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit launched a counterthrust last month in a speech criticizing the Scalia-led assault on the judiciary’s "basically sensible approach."

Justice Scalia, Chief Judge Wald, and their leading allies frame their arguments in terms of legal principle, not politics or ideology, and build on rich intellectual traditions replete with quotations of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Learned Hand, and Felix Frankfurter.

Leading Democrats and their favorite constitutional scholar have come up with an ingenious solution to the great flag-desecration crisis.

To get around the Supreme Court’s invalidation of laws aimed at flag-burning and flag-trampling political protesters, they want to make it a crime for, say, a husband and wife to trample Old Glory in the sacred precincts of the marital bedroom.

Far-fetched? Let Sen. Joseph Biden Jr. of Delaware. Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York, and Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe explain, as Tribe and others will do at three hearings this week before a House subcommittee. As these Democrats read it, the June 21 flag-burning decision, Texas v. Johnson, bars the government only from singling out for punishment those who publicly mistreat the flag as a way of expressing their contempt for it.

No problem, say Biden, Cuomo, Tribe, and company. No need to amend the Constitution; just make it a crime to mistreat a flag in private as well as in public, regardless of whether any political message is intended. Then throw the books at all flag desecraters, political protesters as well as … as well as … -well, as well as all the others, if any.

To make it constitutional, we will have to prosecute lazy scoutmasters who let the Stars and Stripes drag in the dirt and people who maliciously mistreat their own flags in the privacy of their homes for the sheer sadistic pleasure of it.

Biden and company will go to the ramparts to defend your rights to use contraceptives and read obscene books at home, but don’t let them catch you abusing a flag there.

‘Statutory Choo-Choo’

After all, this is the nation’s ultimate judicial tribunal," Justice Felix Frankfurter once said of the Supreme Court.

Not anymore, it isn’t. Comes now a Washington Post survey revealing that the nation’s ultimate tribunal is Judge Joseph Wapner’s "People’s Court."

The numbers speak starkly: 54 percent of 1,005 randomly selected adults named Wapner when asked who presides over "The People’s Court," a television show that boasts more than 8 million viewers every weekday. Only 9 percent could name the chief justice of the United States, William Rehnquist. And when those surveyed were asked to list all the justices they could, only the first woman justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, broke out of single digits. She still lagged badly behind Judge Wapner.

In this country, recognition is power-and signs of the Court’s decline and demoralization are everywhere.

Justice Thurgood Marshall spends his afternoons chuckling over episodes of "The People’s Court" rather than slogging through the tedium of his own Court’s business, according to Time magazine. Rumor has it that many incoming Supreme Court law clerks are vying for clerkships with Wapner and will jump ship if he takes them.

And with everyone from President George Bush to the civil-rights lobby trashing recent Court decisions and pushing Congress to overrule them, we can see the justices’ authority draining like air from a leaky tire.

Just last week we had the spectacle of Bush whooping for a first amendment to the First Amendment in order to overturn the ruling that made the world safe for flag burners. Democrats in Congress are striving for parity in pandering to the public by proposing a new statute against flag desecration.

Wapner for Chief