June 11 (Bloomberg) -- A year after U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts publicly pledged to aim for agreement among the justices, he presides over a Supreme Court divided into ideological camps.

Recent rulings on abortion, job discrimination and the death penalty have highlighted the schism, marking victories for the court's conservatives and leaving its liberals to air their frustrations in dissent.

The final three weeks of the court's term may offer more of the same. The justices are preparing to hand down rulings in school-integration and campaign-spending cases that proved divisive during arguments. The court is scheduled to release rulings today at 10 a.m. in Washington.

``There isn't consensus on this court, and this isn't a court right now with a middle bloc,'' said Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Roberts, 52, has made consensus a top goal since he took the oath of office in September 2005. Speaking at Georgetown University's law-school graduation last year, he said that ``the rule of law is strengthened when there is greater consensus and agreement about what the law is.''

He had some success in his first term, as the court resolved more than half of its cases without dissent, including fights on abortion and campaign-finance restrictions.

Split Decisions

His second term has been a different matter. The court has produced 14 rulings decided by 5-4 margins, compared with only four at the same point a year ago, according to statistics compiled by the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

Eleven of those 14 decisions pitted the court's liberal wing -- Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Stephen Breyer -- against Roberts and fellow conservatives Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

That's left Justice Anthony Kennedy to cast the deciding vote, more often than not siding with the Roberts group. Kennedy voted to allow restrictions on abortion, restrict pay-disparity lawsuits and limit the rights of accused criminals.

``This was inevitable,'' said Charles Cooper, a Washington lawyer at Cooper & Kirk who worked with Roberts and Alito in the Justice Department during President Ronald Reagan's administration. ``What we're seeing is that the court, on many of these politically contentious and jurisprudentially contentious issues, is a divided court.''

Business Docket

The ideological divide has been reflected to some degree in the court's business docket. Kennedy, 70, sided with the court's liberals in ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency must consider steps against global warming. Two other rulings, involving punitive damages and trash-hauling rules, scrambled the usual alignments.

The dissenters are making no secret of their dismay about the direction of the court. Three times since April, one of them has read a summary of the dissent from the bench, a step that typically occurs no more than three times in an entire nine- month term.

In two of those cases, Ginsburg, 74, the only female justice, accused the majority of callousness toward women. The abortion decision, she said, reflected ``ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution.''

In the pay-disparity case, Ginsburg said from the bench that the majority ``does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.''

`Graphic Description'

Last week, Stevens, 87, drew attention to what had been a little-covered dispute involving juror selection in a death penalty case by announcing his disagreement in the courtroom. His written dissent criticized Kennedy's majority opinion for including a ``graphic description'' of the murders, ``perhaps in an attempt to startle the reader or muster moral support for its decision.''

Stevens included that line even though Kennedy's opinion, at least its final form, said only that the convicted man had ``robbed, raped, tortured and murdered'' one woman and ``robbed, raped, tortured and attempted to murder'' another.

Those displays of frustration have led some court-watchers to speculate that the liberal four are looking ahead, anticipating rulings later this month that will limit school integration efforts and give interest groups more power to spend money in advance of elections.

``They know what all the other decisions are on the docket and we don't,'' Chemerinsky said.

Those cases may mark a shift from the days of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who was the court's swing vote on many social issues before she retired last year. President George W. Bush selected Alito, 57, to succeed her.

O'Connor's Influence

O'Connor, 77, backed abortion rights, campaign-finance restrictions and, in some contexts, the use of a race as a school admissions criterion to ensure diversity. She also had close personal relationships with Ginsburg and Breyer.

``When O'Connor was the swing vote, she did have some genuine sympathies with the liberals in some of these emotional areas, and that's no longer the case,'' said Marci Hamilton, a former O'Connor law clerk who teaches at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law in New York. ``In a lot of ways, the liberals are feeling more marginalized than they felt when Justice O'Connor was on the court.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 11, 2007 00:05 EDT