There is a pitched battle among liberal and conservative judges, from the Supreme Court on down, about whether the Constitution imposes meaningful limits on Congress's ability to regulate the environment, the workplace and affirmative action.

If Gore wins, the court might well abandon its recent attempts to impose meaningful limits on Congress's power.

Similarly, Iran will not accept strategically meaningful limits on its nuclear capabilities for a package of economic and technological goodies.

There are no meaningful limits on the size of campaign contributions.

The court's opinion provided a roadmap to "removing meaningful limits on the Commerce Clause" and "threatens to sweep all of productive human activity into federal regulatory reach," she said.

But the justices seemed skeptical, suggesting that it would be impossible to place meaningful limits on business method patents without also affecting a large number of software patents.

"There is virtually no meaningful limit to what we could inject into the system, were that necessary," Mr. Greenspan said.

The dissenting court minority said the decision disregarded the intent of Congress and "all but assures that Medicare's administrative process will cease to function as a meaningful limit on judicial review."

He said there was a "lack of any meaningful limit" to the type of search the opinion would authorize.

Third, the use of the Internet does not impose meaningful limits on the preemptive scope of the claims.