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Charles Bierbauer

By Charles Bierbauer
CNN Senior Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The term-end nervousness set in as it always does as the Supreme Court wound up its work. Apart from the critical case opinions that tend to pile up for the last week, there are the anxious editors asking: Which justice is going to retire? The chief? John Paul Stevens? Sandra Day O'Connor?

The correct answer is always: Beats me!

That didn't stop the Internet rumors or the television networks from placing their satellite trucks outside the court just in case. Friday morning came and Friday morning went. The court handed out its usual paperwork. Nothing more.

I ran into Justice O'Connor in the hallway and told her my editors were nervous about retirements. She seemed amused. "No one's retiring," she smiled.

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Actually, I am, at least from covering the court. Justice O'Connor wished me well.

But I bristle at the word "retire." A couple of media writers have indicated that's what I'm going to do. They never asked me, only misread between the lines of press releases. There's a journalism lesson there -- grist for my Penn State class this fall, one of the things I'm going to do in non-retirement. But that's not today's lesson.

The seasonal speculation about changes on the Supreme Court also turned out to be misreading between the lines. Justice O'Connor put out the word she had no intention of retiring this term. The chief justice recently allowed that he'd thought of retiring. But that was in 1986 before he was elevated to the chief's chair.

Several of the justices are poker players. They play their cards close to their robes. But it looks like the same nine will be in the lineup next season.

In my tenure covering the court --four full seasons and part of a fifth -- there have been no changes. That's an unusually long span without a new justice. The longevity of the current justices is one reason why during last year's election campaign all sides noted the future balance of the Supreme Court would be in the hands of the new president.

As it turned out, the balance of the election was in the hands of the justices. We know how that turned out.

I'd hardly have thought that the emotional and dramatic high point of my coverage would have come on the night of December 12, 2000. It was not even a day the court was scheduled to be in session.

It may not have been the pinnacle of the court's jurisprudence. The 5-4 split that told Florida, in effect, to stop counting disputed ballots seemed to suggest an irreparable rift between the court's putative conservative and liberal wings. But my tenure covering the court has taught me the justices are not as predictable as you might think.

Consider the following alignments in recent court decisions:

Hunt v. Cromartie: O'Connor, always the potential swing vote, joins the liberals to create a 5-4 majority allowing voting districts to be drawn with a majority of minority voters because race "correlates closely with political behavior."

Atwater v. Lago Vista Justice David Souter joins the conservative wing to create a 5-4 majority allowing a police officer to arrest, handcuff and incarcerate a Texas mom for driving while her kids were not wearing seatbelts. An outraged O'Connor leads the dissent over the "pointless indignity" imposed on the woman.

Nguyen v. INS: Justice Stevens sides with the conservatives to allow a gender bias that makes children of American mothers (and non-citizen fathers) U.S. citizens at birth. But American fathers (when mothers are the non-citizens) must formally declare their parenthood to establish the child's citizenship. A dissenting O'Connor rues the gender stereotype.

Kyllo v. U.S.: Conservatives Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas join liberals Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to bar police from using high-tech thermal imaging to "search" inside a home to detect marijuana growing.

"There are no principles. There are no trends," says Michael Carvin, a regular practitioner before the court and a member of the Bush post-election legal team. "What we've had over the last decade or so is a series of ad-hoc decisions with shifting coalitions and concurring opinions that are essentially balancing tasks that can't give you any insight into the future course of the law."

"This is a court confident in the belief that it can decide issues better than any other institution around," says Walter Dellinger, a regular practitioner before the court and a member of the Al Gore legal team.

That's part of what makes the court a fascination. It's far less predictable than the genuinely and overtly political venues in Washington.

I'll miss it. As a non-lawyer, it's been like going to law school at the highest level. Each case has been an education. It's not been all First and Fourth amendments. There have been excursions into wetland takings, maritime law and ERISA (don't ask).

Next term I'd like to sit back and watch some of the case arguments -- affirmative action and the death penalty -- on C-SPAN. But I can't.

In my first Supreme Court column in 1997 I lamented that the court is the "last bastion of government refusing to open its proceedings to cameras." Alas, it still is.

Oh, it let us put our ears to the door and broadcast the audio of the Bush v. Gore arguments. Chief Justice William Rehnquist told me he was surprised at how much public interest the audiotapes aroused.

But cameras are still outside. My last appeal to the justices would be to reconsider in the public's interest.