Many years ago, I covered court cases as a reporter for The Royal Gazette. I think of that experience as one of the most valuable of my life.

In those days, Sir Alan Smith and then Sir Myles Abbott were on the bench in the Supreme Court, the razor-sharp Hector Barcilon was Solicitor General, and later on the bench himself, and Peter Gray ran an immaculately-disciplined Magistrates' Court.

They were all unusually able men, capable of turning in the kind of legal performance you would expect of a renowned musician in a concert hall. I should be at pains to point out that this is not to say our current crop of leading legal lights cannot do the same - like any witness, I can speak only from the standpoint of my personal experience. I do credit those very learned judges and magistrates of the 1960s with infecting me with an appreciation for logic, for precision and for what I feel sure they would have described as nicety of judgement. Someone who takes a lot of interest in books reads them, after a while, not so much to see what happens in the end as to see how the author manoeuvres towards the end. So it is for me with court cases.

I feel able to claim, therefore, that it is with an expertise.a small, armchair variety of expertise, I'll grant you, but an expertise nonetheless.that I will read about a series of cases that will begin to come up in the US Supreme Court later in the session that has just begun.

Many of these cases relate to the way US authorities have moved to counter terrorism since the attacks on the World Trade Center Buildings on September 11 last year. Among the first that will be heard are three that do not specifically involve terrorism, but run on a parallel track.

They concern laws passed after particularly notorious crimes - the Oklahoma City bombing and the murders of Polly Klass and Megan Kanka - that some have charged are excessively broad.

Insofar as human rights are concerned, the US is a very different place today than it was before September, 2001. CBS-New legal analyst Andrew Cohen summed the changes up this way, in a report published last month:

"It's hard to identify another time in our nation's history when the momentum in our courts and in our legislatures was so far in favour of police power and so far against the protection of the procedural and substantive rights of citizens. And it isn't just concrete new laws and rules that have altered, in favour of government, the delicate balance between the individual and the state. The past year also has seen a titanic shift in the way the judicial system operates; a shift that is bound to be more apparent to regular Americans in the months and years to come.

"It's trite but still illustrative to say today that the legal landscape has changed monumentally since September 10, 2001," Mr Cohen said.

"Today, law enforcement officials may use roving wiretaps to follow suspects from one place to another and from one cellphone to another; they may seek records from bookstores and libraries; they may in some cases share domestic intelligence information with their Central Intelligence Agency colleagues; they may seek the deportation of people more quickly and behind closed doors; they may more aggressively track and seize the financial assets of individuals and entities at home and abroad; they may refuse to release to the public even the most basic information about people held behind bars; they may send non-citizens to the bar of justice before a military tribunal instead of a civilian court; and they may, if the President says so, hold US citizens indefinitely - and incommunicado even from their own attorneys - without having to answer to the courts.

"The government may do all of those things, and many more things, because Congress authorized these powers last October in the USA Patriot Act and has since stepped aside; because the White House has exercised these powers continuously over the past year in the name of the President as Commander in Chief; and because federal judges, fearful of authorizing the release of a future terrorist, so far have been mostly unwilling or unable to provide an adequate check on the executive branch. Yes, it is true that most of these new powers have been challenged in court and some of those challenges, at least for now, have been relatively successful. But it also is true," Mr Cohen said, "that the Supreme Court is yet to make any definitive, substantive ruling on any terror-related issue and the victories won so far through great effort by civil libertarians and the media have largely been victories of process over substance."

These changes are being roundly denounced both in the US and out of it.

But.there is a very big but.

The US is at war. Quibblers may argue with that, because this war doesn't fit the pattern of wars of the past. Let them argue. The US is at war, and in wartime, as Chief Justice William Rehnquist has pointed out, judges are always reluctant to rule against the government on an issue involving national security.

In his book, 'All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime', Mr Rehnquist quotes a Latin maxim with a long, long pedigree, inter arma silent leges, which means "in time of war, the law is silent". Furthermore, as commentators in the US are beginning to be fond of saying, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact".

That is a phrase, according to the New York Times, that originated with Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson's dissent from the majority in a 1949 decision involving free speech. The court's majority opinion, written by Justice William O Douglas, who will be remembered for his strongly liberal views, overturned the conviction for disorderly conduct of a priest whose pro-Nazi ranting had started a riot. Mr Jackson thought the conviction should have been upheld: "The choice," he wrote, "is not between freedom and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact".

Justice Rehnquist's book was published four years ago, when it must have seemed a bit of a sterile exercise. Now, of course, it seems almost prescient, and is being seen as an indicator of how his court will handle cases arising out of the war on terrorism.

The book contains, among other things, a recounting of President Abraham Lincoln's actions during the Civil War, and of his struggle with the then-Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger Taney. During that war, Mr Lincoln at one stage took advantage of the fact that Congress was not in session to create an army of state militias, call up volunteers, block ports and, to the fury of the civil rights activists of the day, suspend habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is the right of an accused person to ask a court to order his custodian to make a case for his detention, or let him go free. If you think of habeas corpus as the mother of all rights, you won't go far wrong. Its suspension by President Lincoln allowed thousands of US citizens of the day to be detained and held without charge.

In fact, the American Constitution does allow habeas corpus to be suspended in time of war, but it makes it clear that the President cannot do such a thing without the approval of Congress.

Chief Justice Taney, obviously thinking President Lincoln was in breach of the Constitution, issued a writ of habeas corpus in the case of a man thought to have blown up a railroad bridge. Lincoln simply ignored him, and Mr Taney could do nothing about it.

Months later, in a speech to Congress defending his actions, Mr Lincoln asked "Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one (habeas corpus) be violated?" It was from that speech that Chief Justice Rehnquist took the title of his book.

The Chief Justice writes of other war-time suspensions of civil liberties, including President Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act, which, although having the ostensible purpose of preventing spying, was actually used to silence domestic critics of the First World War. The famous American socialist, Eugene Debs, was jailed for ten years for making a speech that "obstructed" military recruitment, an offence defined by that act. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction unanimously, the judgement having been written by the great Oliver Wendell Holmes himself.

In the Second World War, a presidential order of President Franklin Roosevelt required the registration with the government of all aliens in the country. A month later, all Japanese people, whether they were US citizens or not, were ordered to be interned. Despite this obviously being an edict based entirely upon race, the Supreme Court upheld the government's actions.

Chief Justice Rehnquist ended his analysis with this observation: "It is neither desirable nor is it remotely likely that civil liberty will occupy as favoured a position in wartime as it does in peacetime. But it is both desirable and likely that more careful attention will be paid by the courts to the basis of the government's claims. The laws will thus not be silent in times of war, but they will speak with a somewhat different voice."

Lest you think.dismayed, perhaps.that this is all going one way, let me point out that the road down which the US Supreme Court must begin to walk in a few weeks has the nature of a tightrope. Societies that trade liberty for security, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, and Gore Vidal delights in repeating endlessly, often end up with neither. One aspect of this war makes it unlike any other ever dealt with by the Supreme Court. Given the characteristics of a war on terrorism, how can its end be defined? Doesn't what has been begun have something of the nature of a permanent condition? I shall be in my armchair.