The Supreme Court: The Opinion

WASHINGTON, June 27 -- Providing the strongest evidence yet of the ascension of state power at the Supreme Court, a bitterly divided Court ruled today that the Brady gun control law violated ''the very principle of separate state sovereignty'' by requiring state officials to conduct background checks of prospective handgun purchasers.

The 5-to-4 decision, invalidating the background-check provision of the 1993 law, marked the third time in as many days that the Court overturned a major Federal statute. Earlier in the week, the Justices struck down both the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Communications Decency Act before concluding their 1996-97 term today. The decision today did not address a separate portion of the Brady law that imposes a five-day waiting period before a gun sale can be completed, leaving that provision intact at least for now.

The decision opened a new chapter in a profound and continuing debate among the Justices over the essential nature of the system of shared authority between the Federal Government and the states. Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion and the principal dissenting opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens ranged deeply into the nation's history, each disputing the other on the meaning of particular passages in the Federalist Papers as well as about how to interpret the Court's rulings on federalism over the years.

President Clinton and Congressional supporters of the Brady law, which was named for James S. Brady, the former White House press secretary who was shot and gravely wounded in the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, said today that they would work to find an alternative to the invalidated provision.

Although Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist simply joined Justice Scalia's opinion today, without writing separately, the outcome was a triumph for the Chief Justice. He began his Supreme Court service 25 years ago as a critic of what he saw as the Court's aggrandizement of Federal power, and now presides over a solid, if narrow bloc, of five Justices who, in case after case, are aggressively readjusting the state-Federal balance in favor of the states.

Besides Justice Scalia and the Chief Justice, the majority today comprised Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. This was the same five-Justice majority that two years ago, in a case called United States v. Lopez, ruled that a Federal law banning the possession of guns near schools exceeded Congressional authority. That decision was the first time since the New Deal that the Court had invalidated an exercise of Congress's asserted authority to regulate interstate commerce.

Last year the same five Justices made up the majority in Seminole Tribe v. Florida, which invalidated a 1988 Federal law on Indian gambling and held that Congress lacked the authority to permit Indian tribes to sue state governments in Federal court.

In addition to Justice Stevens, the dissenters today, as in the earlier two cases, were Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

While the ruling today, Printz v. United States, No. 95-1478, alluded both to Congressional power under the Commerce Clause as well as to state authority under the 10th Amendment, which gives to the states the powers that the Constitution does not otherwise give to the Federal Government, Justice Scalia's opinion was not based on any one constitutional provision.

Rather, Justice Scalia based his conclusion on his view of the constitutional structure as a whole. He described the state and national governments as coequal sovereigns, coexisting on a political and constitutional level of equivalence. ''This separation of the two spheres is one of the Constitution's structural protections of liberty,'' Justice Scalia said.

He said it was no more acceptable for state and local officials to be required to administer Federal laws ''than it would be compatible with the independence and autonomy of the United States that its officers be impressed into service for the execution of state laws.''

The Court's conclusion was ''categorical,'' Justice Scalia said; there could be no ''balancing analysis'' that could give more weight to the Federal interests at stake in particular circumstances.

Against this vision, the dissenters put forward a diametrically opposite concept of the state-Federal relationship. Justice Stevens said it was clear that when Congress acted within one of its express grants of constitutional authority -- in this case, its power under the Commerce Clause -- the Federal Government was supreme and its actions were binding on the states. He noted that Article VI of the Constitution declares that Federal law ''shall be the supreme Law of the Land'' and requires state officials to take an oath to support the Constitution.

''Not only the Constitution, but every law enacted by Congress as well,'' Justice Stevens said, ''establishes policy for the states just as firmly as do laws enacted by state legislatures.'' He said that ''there is not a clause, sentence or paragraph in the entire text of the Constitution of the United States that supports the proposition that a local police officer can ignore a command contained in a statute enacted by Congress'' acting under one of its constitutional powers.

While Justice Scalia described the Brady law as a direct Federal assault on the states, Justice Stevens said the law imposed at most a ''trivial burden'' and ''modest duties'' on local law-enforcement officials.

In states that have not adopted their own background-check system under state law, as 27 states have done, the law requires the local officials to take ''reasonable'' efforts to check criminal records within a five-day waiting period to determine whether there is a reason a would-be buyer of a handgun should not be permitted to proceed with the purchase from a federally licensed gun dealer. A separate Federal law makes it a crime for felons, fugitives, drug users and some other categories of people to buy guns.

According to Federal statistics, the law has been quite effective, leading to the rejection of some 6,600 gun purchase applications a month.

The National Rifle Association has financed legal challenges to the law around the country, with mixed results. The case before the Court today was an appeal by two sheriffs, Jay Printz of Ravalli County, Mont., and Richard Mack of Graham County, Ariz., who challenged the law successfully in separate Federal District Court lawsuits. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, then heard the Government's appeal and upheld the law in a 1995 ruling.

For the Brady law itself, the impact of the ruling today may be somewhat limited. The background check provision was scheduled to expire in November 1998, to be replaced by a Federal record-checking system to be used by the gun dealers themselves.

Representative Charles E. Schumer, the Brooklyn Democrat who was the Brady law's original sponsor, said today that he would introduce a bill to make it illegal in the interim for gun dealers to sell a gun unless they first find a sheriff, either in their own jurisdiction or elsewhere, who will conduct a background check on the would-be purchaser. ''We will not allow a handful of rogue sheriffs to undermine or weaken the Brady law,'' he said.

In an interview, Mr. Schumer said that beyond the fate of the Brady law, the decision today had ''huge implications'' for federalism, undermining the basis for much modern Federal legislation. ''If you take the Scalia opinion to its logical extreme, you could go back to the 1890's,'' he said.

Federal laws now require states to administer some Federal labor and environmental programs. Bills pending in Congress to require states to give utility consumers access to alternative retail suppliers could possibly run afoul of the Court's analysis today.

Most Federal mandates on the states will not be affected by the ruling because they have at least theoretically been accepted voluntarily by states as inducements for eligibility for various Federal grants, such as money for highways or schools.

The opinions reflected very different views of the intentions and trustworthiness of Congress, with Justice Scalia's the more cynical. ''By forcing state governments to absorb the financial burden of implementing a Federal regulatory program,'' he said, ''members of Congress can take credit for 'solving' problems without having to ask their constituents to pay for the solutions with higher Federal taxes,'' and at the same time can make sure that local officials ''will be blamed for any error'' in how the program works.

Justice Stevens, by contrast, said the Court should rely on Congress to make the political judgments on what to require of the states. Given the political accountability of members of Congress to the electorate, he said, ''it is quite unrealistic to assume that they will ignore the sovereignty concerns of their constituents.'' He added, ''It is far more reasonable to presume that their decisions to impose modest burdens on state officials from time to time reflect a considered judgment that the people in each of the states will benefit therefrom.''

The courtroom was surprisingly empty for the final day of the term, perhaps because members of the Washington bar, knowing that only the Brady law case was due for decision, decided not to come. But the tourists, the Court staff and Administration lawyers who showed up were treated to a riveting and unusual display as Justice Scalia summarized his opinion and Justice Stevens responded.

Side by side the two Justices sat, the bearded, dark-haired Justice Scalia, youthful at 61, and the grandfatherly Justice Stevens, at 75 the Court's oldest member, both men deeply committed to opposing visions of the constitutional structure they have devoted their professional lives to interpreting.

Justice Stevens at times read from a memorandum that contained excerpts from his dissenting opinion. But often he spoke off the cuff, looking directly at the small audience as he explained his disagreement.

He made some sly points that his written opinion omitted. For example, he said that in its lack of textual support in the Constitution itself, the majority opinion reminded him of an opinion by Justice William O. Douglas that extrapolated a right to privacy from the Constitution's ''emanations'' and ''penumbras.'' That opinion, in Griswold v. Connecticut, has been denounced for 30 years by judicial conservatives as the height of judicial activism.

The debate today over Supreme Court precedent centered on a 1992 decision, New York v. United States, in which the Court declared unconstitutional a law that required states to handle their low-level radioactive waste. In effect, the Court said then, this law impermissibly required states to pass legislation.

In support of the Brady law, the Government and the dissenters today argued that the holding of New York v. United States was inapplicable because the background-check provision required nothing so out of the ordinary of local law-enforcement officers. Justice Scalia's opinion said this distinction was ''interesting'' but not persuasive.

There were several separate concurring and dissenting opinions today. One of the more interesting was by Justice Thomas, who said that given the Second Amendment's reference to ''the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,'' he doubted whether Congress had the power to regulate intrastate gun sales at all.

Illustrations: Photos: Reacting to the Supreme Court's decision yesterday opposing part of the Brady law, Wayne LaPierre, left, chief executive of the National Rifle Association, said the gun control law was turning into ''the N.R.A. bill.'' (Reuters); Above, Sarah Brady, wife of James S. Brady, for whom the law is named, greeted Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation, at the High Court as Bob Walker, head of Hand Gun Control, looked on. (Amy Toensing for The New York Times)(pg. 9); Justices Thomas, Scalia, O'Connor, Kennedy, Rehnquist, Souter, Breyer, Stevens and Ginsburg. (Pool Photograph by Associated Press)(pg. 1)