In U.S. legal history, decisions of great and lasting importance have often been linked to cases that seem relatively insignificant. This may be true of a recent ruling in a pair of cases involving an employer's response to an individual illness -- and if so, many find that extremely unsettling. PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson is the author of "The Future of the Self" (Tarcher Putnam, 1997).

A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision has a lot of people worried and unhappy.

The ruling came in a case involving a woman who tried to sue her employer for demoting her and reducing her pay when she returned to work after breast cancer treatment.

Among the disgruntled are four justices who dissented from the decision, legislators who helped pass the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), leaders of organizations supporting the rights of disabled workers, former President George Bush, and Constitutional scholars who fear the Rehnquist court is chipping away at the power of Congress.

The case, University of Alabama v. Garrett, also has some echoes of the recent flap over the Florida vote in the presidential election -- since it was decided by a slim majority, the same five justices who voted to override the Florida Supreme Court.

The main plaintiff in the case, Patricia Garrett, served as head maternity nurse at the University of Alabama's Birmingham hospital until she developed breast cancer. She took a four-month unpaid leave of absence for treatment, which was successful, but when she returned she was denied her former position and offered one at significantly lower pay.

In a related case, a security guard named Milton Ash claimed his severe asthma was being aggravated by smoking coworkers and leaking exhaust from a vehicle he drove on the job. Both sued for relief in the federal courts under the ADA, a federal law passed in 1990 to prohibit job discrimination based on disabilities.

Over the next few years, as the cases moved through the court system, the arguments were not so much about the medical problems of Garret and Ash as about the question of whether they had the legal right to sue the state of Alabama in a federal court. That right is limited by the U.S. Constitution, but the ADA specifically authorized such suits, citing evidence that states had tended to be insensitive to disability cases.

The federal district court in ruled in favor of Alabama. The U.S. Court of Appeals reversed that decision and ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. The case moved on to the Supreme Court, and as it did all kinds of people -- people who might not ordinarily be expected to involve themselves in the lives of a demoted nurse and an asthmatic security guard -- got into the act.

A bipartisan group of legislators and former legislators who had crafted the ADA -- among them Tom Harkin, Orrin Hatch, Edward Kennedy and Robert Dole -- filed a Friend of the Court brief on behalf of the plaintiffs.

So did former President George Bush, who had signed the ADA into law.

So did a platoon of advocacy groups including the National Organization on Disability, the Anti-Defamation League, Paralyzed Veterans of America, People for the American Way and the American Civil Liberties Union.

So did various historians, legal scholars, law professors, and the American Bar Association.

But the Supreme Court -- Justices William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas voting in the majority -- ruled that the ADA was out of line. Rehnquist almost contemptuously brushed aside the reasoning behind the law.

The documentation amassed by Congress was only, he wrote, a collection of "unexamined, anecdotal accounts" which failed to prove a pattern of discrimination. In short, the elected legislators had not known what they were doing.

Writing the opinion for the dissenting minority, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that Congress, in passing ADA, had acted on the basis of strong evidence of "substantial unjustified discrimination against persons with disabilities," and that the majority's decision "improperly invades a power that the Constitution assigns to Congress."

And that is the issue worrying many Court-watchers and legal scholars around the country. They see the case not in terms of disabled people vs. employers, or even of states' rights versus federal power, but as a question of legislative branch vs. judicial branch.