A year ago, at the end of the 1980 term, a consensus developed among observers of the U.S. Supreme Court: The court was drifting. With the end of the 1981 term, that view remains unchanged: The court is still drifting. This past term saw no new landmarks, no great beacons of the law. We had nothing to rank with the Brown case on school segregation, or the Miranda case on the rights of an accused, or the Miller case on pornog-' raphy. The court never painted with a broad brush on a big canvas. We wound up with small etchings, tightly framed. A simple explanation - it is not intended to be cynical - accounts for the situation. We pride ourselves on saying that

It is a myth, a shibboleth, a sham. , At the level of the Supreme Court, ours is emphatically not a government 1 of abstract law, but a government of eight very mortal men and one woman. As always, these nine human beings brought to their opinions the accumulated convictions, prejudices and attitudes of their lifetimes. Members of the court detest the journalist's practice of putting them in ideological pigeonholes, but the custom gains in understanding more than it loses in precision. With few exceptions, the three conservatives (Burger, Rehnquist and O'Connor) came down on the side of judicial restraint and narrow construction. The three liberals (Brennan, Marshall and Blackmun) tended toward activism and expansion. The three centrists (White, Powell and Stevens) tilted the teeter-totter first here, then there. In a recent