BRISTOL — All rise.

One day after court officials confirmed that Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr. will visit Rhode Island next month, college officials yesterday announced that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will visit the Roger Williams University School of Law in April.

Also, honor students at the state’s only law school will meet with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. when they travel to Washington, D.C., and a pair of Pulitzer Prize winners who have written about the Supreme Court will speak at the Bristol campus.

“So this really is a supreme semester,” law school dean David A. Logan said yesterday before a debate titled “Should the U.S. Supreme Court be Conservative?”

The debate pitted Ronald A. Cass, a former Boston University law school dean who rallied support for the nomination of Roberts and Alito, versus Nan Aron, the president of the Alliance for Justice who has led opposition to conservative nominees such as Judge Robert Bork.

While law students will be meeting with some of the high court’s most conservative members, they also are hearing from Aron and Anthony Lewis, a “prominent liberal intellectual” and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author, college officials said.

“I do believe in balance,” Logan said. “A law school, just like a human being that doesn’t engage with unfamiliar ideas, is not going to be well rounded.”

On March 19, students will hear from Lewis, author of a new book, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment. Lewis also wrote the 1964 book Gideon’s Trumpet, describing the story behind Gideon v. Wainwright, a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that criminal defendants have the right to a lawyer even if they can’t afford one.

On April 7, Scalia, “who is widely regarded as the intellectual anchor of the court’s conservative wing,” will visit the law school, the college announced. Scalia will teach a constitutional law class and meet with faculty and students in small groups, Logan said. Scalia’s visit was arranged through Cass, a member of the law school’s board of directors.

On April 14, about two dozen honor students will go to Washington, D.C., to hear arguments before the Supreme Court and to meet with Alito. Logan said the visit with Alito was arranged through Senior Circuit Judge Bruce M. Selya, a Rhode Island resident and adjunct faculty member and member of the law school board.

On April 15, University of California Los Angeles law Prof. Devon W. Carbado will give the latest installment of the Thurgood Marshall lecture series. And on May 16, graduates will hear a commencement address by Linda Greenhouse, a reporter for The New York Times who has won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the Supreme Court.

Yesterday’s debate began with Aron showing a film that criticized the first term of the Roberts court, comparing what Roberts and Alito said during their confirmation hearings with how they ruled in two cases.

Cass defended Roberts and Alito, saying, “They have lived up to what they said. They have obeyed the precedents. They haven’t extended the precedents the way some people want them to.”

Each year, some 90 million lawsuits are filed and the Supreme Court reviews 80 cases, but confirmation battles focus on a small set of politically charged issues, Cass said. “We have tried to get people on the court who are committed to certain outcomes,” he said. “That is the antithesis of the rule of law.”

The Senate was not given the role of a “coequal appointer,” Cass said. Rather, the Senate was to serve a check to ensure presidents did not appointment incompetent people. But, he said, “We now have a situation where there are political campaigns to see who ought to sit on the court, where the senators ask people to take positions, to swear allegiance to certain types of outcomes.”

Cass said, “If it’s going to be a political contest, we may as well just vote on the outcomes rather than have the court do it. We need courts to protect us. We need stable rules to protect us.”

Aron agreed that the country needs a stable, reliable legal system. But, she said, “I think we saw anything but reliability or stability from the Roberts court. When you juxtapose their testimony at their hearings with actually how they ruled it’s almost like two very different people.” She said the White House coaches judicial nominees to say little and evade questions.

While the president nominates judges, the Senate has always had the task of deciding whether a nominee is up to being a Supreme Court justice, Aron said. “I think it works best being a political process,” she said. And this election year is crucial “because the next president we elect will make some pretty critical decisions affecting the future of the Supreme Court.”

Aron recalled arguing her first civil-rights case in 1973 before a judge in Detroit. She said she stayed up late, rehearsing her argument and rewriting her legal brief, and believed she “had a fighting chance” although the judge was appointed by a Republican president.

But today, Aron said, “Most of you will find that even before you enter a District Court or Court of Appeals, you will know what the result is before you even open your mouth because of the unrelenting campaign by modern day court-packing presidents of Reagan, George Bush Sr. and [George W.] Bush to pack the courts with judges hostile to the environment, hostile to consumer protections, hostile to reproductive rights and hostile to civil rights.”

Cass disagreed, saying, “Regardless of who sits on the court, in virtually any court in America, you will get a fair shake before that judge.”

efitzpat@projo.com