No corner of the law, it seems, is too arcane to become a front in the ideological battle between liberals and conservatives over the federal judiciary.

Witness the hot debate developing over the extent to which courts should use legislative history as a guide to interpreting acts of Congress.

A few years ago, this subject could hardly have warmed the heart of a fledgling law professor scrounging for a tenure piece. Now, with the rise of a new conservative jurisprudence, the tectonic plates underpinning the law may be starting to move.

The longstanding consensus that courts should discern congressional intent through liberal use of legislative history-committee reports, floor debate and the like-is breaking down. And the issues now surfacing could be "of enormous consequence, in a vast number of cases," in the words of Justice Antonin Scalia.

He is the philosophical leader of a movement to focus almost exclusively on the meaning of the statutory text in interpreting legislation and to reduce or even abandon judicial reliance upon legislative history.

In several opinions Justice Scalia has assailed what he considers the profligate use by courts in recent decades of staff-written legislative history-which he has called "judicial abdication to a fictitious legislative intent."

His approach is sometimes called "textualism." Warning that "the textualists are on the march," Chief Judge Patricia Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit launched a counterthrust last month in a speech criticizing the Scalia-led assault on the judiciary’s "basically sensible approach."

Justice Scalia, Chief Judge Wald, and their leading allies frame their arguments in terms of legal principle, not politics or ideology, and build on rich intellectual traditions replete with quotations of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Learned Hand, and Felix Frankfurter.

But those bashing the use of legislative history most energetically, including Scalia, are conservatives, and those defending it most tenaciously, including Wald, are liberals.

This ideological cleavage is not altogether coincidental. With Republicans holding a long-term lease on not only the presidency but also, increasingly, the judiciary, conservatives have a stake in enhancing the powers of these branches at the expense of Congress, the last bastion of liberalism.

Disregarding legislative history would enhance executive power, because the Supreme Court defers to the government’s interpretations of statutes unless there is clear evidence of contrary congressional intent; it would be harder to find such evidence without resort to committee reports or floor debate.

Ignoring legislative history would arguably enhance judicial power at the expense of Congress, in cases not involving the government, because judges would be free to choose the interpretations they prefer without paying attention to congressional intent as expressed in legislative history.

Another facet of the split on this issue is that Democratic leaders and committee heads, generally to the left of Congress’ ideological center of gravity, may be able to put a more liberal spin on the committee reports prepared by their aides than on statutory language that must win adoption by Congress as a whole.

Justice Scalia, the Supreme Court’s most ardent champion of presidential power and of confining the exercise of congressional power within strict constitutional boundaries, argues that committee reports and floor debates do not illuminate the intent of Congress as a whole because they are neither voted on, nor read, nor heard by most of the members who adopt legislation.

Rather, he says, legislative history is often contrived by unelected committee aides and lobbyists to influence judicial interpretation and is sometimes inserted into the Congressional Record without even being spoken on the floor.

Justice Scalia also disputes the very notion that judges should seek to enforce the original intent of Congress- insofar as it may differ from the "original meaning" of the legislative language it adopts. He says that this circumvents the Constitution’s requirement that legislation be publicly voted on so that supporters will be accountable to the electorate and abdicates the duly of the judiciary to interpret the laws.

Besides, he says, legislative histories are so filled with contradictory signals that willful judges can easily bolster preconceived conclusions with scraps of debate and snippets of analysis.

Conservative federal appellate judges, including Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit and to some extent Justice Anthony Kennedy, have joined Justice Scalia in the vanguard of the assault on legislative history. At the Supreme Court-where about half of all cases involve interpretation of Federal statutes-Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor have occasionally joined in. The Reagan Justice Department produced a 123-page paper in January arguing for the Scalia approach.

While Chief Judge Wald’s speech last month was the most conspicuous counterstroke, other legislative-history fans, including Judges Abner Mikva of the D.C. Circuit and Stephen Breyer of the 1st Circuit, have made similar arguments.

Chief Judge Wald stressed that the plain statutory language is not much help in resolving most disputes that reach federal courts and that she "very often find[s] it not only helpful but necessary to consult the legislative history" to honor the will of Congress.

The alternative, she said, is for judges either to take a "hyper-literal" approach or to allow subjective "judicial assumptions, speculation, preferences, and notions of sound public policy to fill the vacuum."

Underlying the debate is a disagreement about how Congress actually works.

Contrary to Justice Scalia, Judge Mikva, a former congressman, and Judge Breyer, former chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, argue persuasively that legislative history often provides a faithful record of the intent of the committee members supporting a piece of legislation and others deeply involved in it.

On the other hand, it is clear that the committee reports and floor debates are not carefully considered by Congress as a whole. Neither, for that matter, is most of the statutory language that the members vote into law.

Congress, by its nature, is an unwieldy collection of competing interests that have difficulty speaking with one voice. The Scalia ideal of Congress as a whole adopting coherent, specific statutory language is probably unattainable. For this reason the assault on legislative history, carried to its logical extreme, would cramp the ability of Congress to set policy in the only way it realistically can.

Justice Scalia is right to blow the whistle on efforts to change the central meaning of a statute by slipping into the legislative history language that is too controversial to win adoption on the floor or to plant in the legislative history thoughts that hardly any member of Congress ever entertained.

But the committee heads and members most involved in a piece of legislation should be able to use legislative history to provide more-detailed guidance on the fine points of a new law than can realistically be done in the statutory text.

Congress so far has seemed oblivious to the assault on what Chief Judge Wald calls its "chosen form of organization and delegation of authority." It might do well to clean up its own act by purging committee reports of the detritus inserted by lobbyists. And Congress should take defensive action, such as passing a resolution telling courts how it wants them to use legislative history and which materials-actual floor statements by those managing proposed legislation, for example-should be considered most reliable.