When President Bush named Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court, the usual suspects said the usual things.

They nicknamed Alito "Scalito," insinuating he was a clone of their brilliant but caustic b?te noire, Antonin Scalia. "If Samuel Alito is confirmed to replace Sandra Day O'Connor, he will shift the Supreme Court dramatically to the right for decades to come," warned Ralph Neas of People for the American Way. As for Roberts, Sen. Patrick Leahy warned that his career "paint[s] a picture of John Roberts as an eager and aggressive advocate of policies that are deeply tinged with the ideology of the far right wing of his party, then and now."

Eeek!

Now consider some of the rulings to issue from the Roberts Court this term. In recent days the court has . . . .

-- (1) Ruled 6-3 for an employee against an insurance company over a denial of benefits;

-- (2) Ruled 7-1 that employers bear the burden of proof when statistics indicate possible age discrimination in employment;

-- (3) Ruled 8-1 that a man who was wrongfully arrested should have been provided legal counsel sooner;

-- (4) Ruled 6-3 that a convicted murderer deserved a new trial because jurors heard testimony that should have been excluded -- a procedural nicety that tough-on-crime types would call a "technicality";

-- (5) Ruled 5-4 against capital punishment for raping a child.

Even for those who are dismayed by the Court's ruling upholding Second Amendment rights, that doesn't exactly sound like a bunch of Visigoths in black robes, does it?

True, the four conservative justices made up the minority in the child-rape ruling, and they joined the majority in other cases where the outcome could have been called more conservative than liberal.

ON THE OTHER hand, liberal Justice David Souter wrote the majority opinion slashing punitive damages in the Exxon Valdez oil-spill case. On the third hand, his reasoning might be called conservative: He believes punitive damages should be "reasonably predictable" -- and besides, reviewing damages is, traditionally, a judicial responsibility.

On a fourth hand, liberal Justice John Paul Stevens' argument in dissent also sounded conservative in its deference to Congress -- which, he noted, had not imposed punitive-damage caps. Likewise, liberal Ruth Bader Ginsberg accused Souter of engaging in "lawmaking," which is something no conservative jurist approves of doing. "The new law made by the court should have been left to Congress," she wrote. In short, she called Souter a judicial activist.

Simply running the results of the Supreme Court's rulings through a binary ideological filter drains too much of the complexity from the cases, which often defy simplistic liberal/conservative analysis. In some instances, a judicial approach that is conservative in its respect for precedent and its deference to the political branches of government will yield a result that political conservatives abhor. (See, for example, the majority opinion in the 2005 case in Kelo v. New London about eminent domain.) In other instances, a judicial approach that is conservative in its fidelity to the original language of the Constitution, the plain meaning of its text, and the intent of the Founders will yield a result that political conservatives will cheer. (See, for example, Clarence Thomas' dissent in Kelo.) By the same token, a ruling that overturns a congressional statute and ignores decades of precedent, based on a wildly novel theory of constitutional analysis, should not please conservatives even if it produces a result they find agreeable.

Indeed, fidelity to conservative principles sometimes can produce results that look very liberal. Take the ruling granting convicted killer Dwayne Giles a new trial in the murder of Brenda Avie. In 2002, Avie told the police Giles had assaulted her and threatened to kill her. A few weeks later Avie was shot to death, and the police hung the rap on Giles. This week a majority of justices said Avie's statement to the cops shold have been excluded from Giles' trial because the Constitution guarantees a defendant the right to confront his accuser -- and that doesn't change just because the accuser happens to have been killed by the person who is on trial.

IT'S THE SORT of soft-on-criminals ruling you might have expected from the Warren Court that conservatives have loved to hate for so long. And it was authored chiefly by . . . .Antonin Scalia. But his reasoning was grounded in the conservative value of judicial restraint: "It is not the role of courts to extrapolate from the words of the Sixth Amendment to the values behind it," he wrote, "and then to enforce its guarantees only to the extent they serve (in the courts' views) those underlying values. The Sixth Amendment seeks fairness indeed -- but seeks it through very specific means (one of which is confrontation) that were the trial rights of Englishmen."

Scalia was simply applying what he considered strict fidelity to his principles, regardless of whether he liked the particular outcome. It's too bad knee-jerk critics of the Court -- on both the left and the right -- don't do more of the same.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.
Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.