The Voice of Dissent Often Has Its Day on High Court : Justice: The power of dissent has often seen the minority opinion become the majority opinion as time passes.

Hugo L. Black had the rare privilege of speaking for the Supreme Court on March 18, 1963, when it unanimously reversed itself and decided that he had been right all along.

Twenty-one years earlier, Black had led a band of three dissenters as the court ruled that the Constitution did not require states to provide counsel for criminal defendants who were too poor to hire their own lawyers.

Now the court was considering the case of Clarence Earl Gideon, convicted in a Florida court of breaking into a poolroom. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

Gideon told the judge he was entitled to a lawyer. The judge and the Florida Supreme Court both turned him down.

The situation, said Black, was “strikingly like” the 1942 case, in which an unemployed Maryland farmhand, denied a lawyer, was convicted of robbery.

In that case, the high court ruled that the appointment of counsel was not “a fundamental right, essential to a fair trial.”

Now, with all of his colleagues on his side, Black’s decision ruled that Gideon was indeed entitled to a lawyer.

“The right of one charged with crime to counsel may not be deemed fundamental and essential to fair trials in some countries, but it is in ours,” he said.

Black’s triumph was a dramatic demonstration of the power of dissent--a power that often has seen the minority opinion become the majority opinion as time passes.

One of the most famous dissents in the court’s history was that of John Marshall Harlan in a Louisiana railroad case in 1896 that established the rule of “separate but equal” facilities for the races.

“Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Harlan said. “In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”

He was the lone dissenter.

In 1954, however, the court unanimously ruled that the “separate but equal” doctrine was unconstitutional discrimination against black children because “separate education facilities are inherently unequal.”

Often, more than one justice files a dissenting opinion. In the court’s 1986 term, for example, there were 156 dissents, exactly the number of cases the court decided on the merits, although 41 of the court’s decisions were unanimous.

Most of the dissents attract little attention. In some of the more famous ones:

* Justice Louis D. Brandeis pioneered the theory, now widely accepted, of a constitutional right to privacy.

* Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. warned against “attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”

* Justice William O. Douglas inveighed against loyalty-security hearings in which “faceless people are allowed to present their whispered rumors and yet escape the test and torture of cross-examination.”

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes summed up the case for the dissenters this way:

“A dissent in a court of last resort is an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day, when a later decision may possibly correct the error into which the dissenting judge believes the court to have been betrayed.”