THE GOOD NEWS is that disliking the Supreme Court is all right again. In recent years most of the criticism of the Court's decisions and of its political role had come from conservatives. The liberal response had most often been that the Court is an old and venerable institution whose decisions are

"the law of the land." If this were intended as a serious argument it could hardly be more superfluous, since any serious critic of the Court is keenly aware that five Justices can enact any policy they like into a law no legislature can repeal. The principal effect of the "law of the land" slogan, however, is to waft the innuendo that those who continue to argue about an issue once the Court has decided it are at least slightly un-American. In helping to secure a confused and grudging popular acquiescence in policies for which few modern Americans (and even fewer ratifiers of the Constitution) would ever have voted, the tactic of Court-worship has served the liberal establishment well.

The vigorous reaction in the press and elsewhere to a few of the Court's decisions in the term just ended, however, suggests that the honeymoon may be over. In reporting on the exclusionary-rule cases decided on the last day of the term, for instance, press reports did not emphasize the narrow scope and limited practical importance of the exception to the rule announced by the Court. The exclusionary rule, based on the Fourth Amendment, forbids the use of evidence in court if the evidence was seized illegally. The rule usually governs situations where the police seize evidence without a search warrant. In the two recent cases the police did have warrants issued by judges and believed by the police officers to be valid, but appellate courts later discovered defects in the warrants. (In one case the appellate court decided that the judge did not have legally sufficient reason to believe that a cache of drugs was on the premises, although the drugs in fact turned out to be there. In the other case the police sought and found the weapon with which the defendant had bludgeoned a woman to death, but the judge had used a printed form designed for drug searches and had not altered it sufficiently to change the drug warrant into a bludgeon warrant.)

When the Court devised the exclusionary rule in the first place--and it was not until 1961 that it was held to be a rule of constitutional law binding on state and local governments--it was to deter police misconduct, not judicial error. The Court has now concluded simply that no police misconduct is likely to be deterred by reversing convictions where the police did only what they had been told in advance by judges that it was proper to do. Yet the press did not seem happy, and the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union was even unhappier. Reflecting on the exclusionary-rule cases and others of the recent term, he declared that the Court was not so much "conservative" as "statist." He added that the Justices had adopted the role "cheerleaders for the government."

Other recent cases have also generated more controversy than they deserved. When the Court held that a federal court could not, under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, require a fire department to eliminate its "last hired, first fired" seniority system, the decision required only a straightforward reading of the act itself, which contains an explicit exemption for "bonafide seniority systems." But the decision has been portrayed as a significant reversal for civil rights in general, in part perhaps because some journalists seem to be under the remarkable impression that the Court announced that fire departments

shall henceforth be required to institute seniority systems that discriminate against blacks.

Similarly, the Court's decision not to prohibit cities and towns from including representations of the infant Christ in Christmas displays has been presented as something other than the easy case it was in the light of the history of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Indeed, the awkward thing about Chief Justice Burger's opinion in that case was his attempt to reconcile that constitutionality of Christmas creches with the unconstitutionality of other practices, such as school prayer, that were prohibited not by the Framers of the Constitution but by the Warren Court.

So the bad news is that the conservative revolution in the Court has not actually occurred. What did happen last term, perhaps more often than in other recent terms, is that five Justices chose to interpret statutes and constitutional provisions according to the intentions of those who enacted them, rather than to lead cheers for the ACLU. The three youngest members of the Court--Justices O'Connor, Rehnquist, and White--were almost always members of this precarious majority. If President Reagan is re-elected in November, the next four years might see the emergence of a Court majority that really would question the Warren Court's assumptions about the role of the federal judiciary in our society. This, perhaps, is what really upsets the Court's new critics.