ASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — The Supreme Court added a significant new federalism case to its docket for the new term on Tuesday, accepting an appeal filed by the State of Tennessee on whether states are immune from suit under federal bankruptcy law.

States are often brought into federal court in bankruptcy proceedings, not because they themselves are bankrupt but because they are creditors. Most of the 1.5 million people who file for bankruptcy every year owe debts to an agency of state government and seek relief from the obligation to repay those debts, so the case has a highly practical dimension as well as implications for the Supreme Court's continuing reexamination of the balance of power between the federal government and the states.

The underlying dispute in the new case, an effort by a woman who filed for bankruptcy to be freed of the obligation to repay her student loans, is fairly typical of the ways that states find themselves embroiled in bankruptcy proceedings. Under federal law, student loans that are guaranteed by governmental agencies, as many are, are not treated as ordinary debts that can be wiped away in bankruptcy proceedings. Instead, the law requires proof that repaying the loan would produce "an undue hardship."

After receiving relief from her other debts in a bankruptcy filing in 1999, Pamela L. Hood went back to federal bankruptcy court to establish her entitlement to a "hardship discharge" of the $4,169.13 she owed to the Tennessee Student Assistance Corporation, a state agency that had guaranteed her loan. To accomplish that, she had to name the state agency as a defendant in a federal lawsuit. But Tennessee refused to take part in the proceeding, arguing that it was protected by sovereign immunity from the jurisdiction of the bankruptcy court.

Both the bankruptcy court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which sits in Cincinnati, rejected the state's position, in contrast to several other federal appeals courts that have interpreted the Supreme Court's recent rulings on state immunity as extending to bankruptcy proceedings as well.

In its current form, this debate began in 1996, when the Supreme Court ruled in Seminole Tribe v. Florida that Congress lacked the constitutional power to authorize suits by Indian tribes against the states. The majority's theory in that 5-to-4 decision was that the 11th Amendment, which deprives the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear certain suits against states, trumped Article I of the Constitution, which enumerates specific Congressional powers, like the power to regulate interstate commerce.

In a dissenting opinion in the Seminole Tribe case, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the majority's theory would disable Congress from enforcing federal bankruptcy, copyright and antitrust laws against the states. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the majority opinion's author, took issue with that warning, responding in a footnote that Justice Stevens's "conclusion is exaggerated both in its substance and in its significance." Since then, the bankruptcy question has produced considerable debate, and it appeared unlikely that the court would be able to avoid confronting it directly.

In this case, Tennessee Student Assistance Corporation v. Hood, No. 02-1606, a group of leading bankruptcy scholars who oppose Tennessee's position nonetheless filed a brief urging the justices to hear the state's appeal in order to resolve the issue. "Assertion of state sovereign immunity is now commonplace in bankruptcy cases and has an enormous impact on the bankruptcy system, debtors, and creditors," the scholars' brief said.

A brief filed on Tennessee's behalf by 48 of the other 49 states — all but New Jersey — said that what was at issue was "a state's ability to control its fisc." There was nothing special about bankruptcy, the states said, that would deprive states of the immunity they enjoyed from laws enacted under the other Congressional powers conveyed by Article I of the Constitution.

In rejecting Tennessee's immunity claim, however, the Sixth Circuit concluded that bankruptcy was in fact special in important respects. The court said that the Constitution's framers thought it was essential to have uniform bankruptcy rules apply on a national level so that states would not set up their own systems to favor in-state creditors. The states understood this, the court said, and knowingly gave up an aspect of their sovereignty when they agreed to ratify a Constitution that gave Congress the power to establish "uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States."

The Tennessee appeal was one of 10 new cases the court accepted on Tuesday, six days in advance of the formal start of the 2003-2004 term next Monday, the first Monday in October.

In another case on the list,

the court agreed to hear an appeal by the State of Pennsylvania from a federal court ruling that for the second time invalidated the death sentence in a notorious 21-year-old murder case. The defendant, George Banks, was convicted of killing five of his children and eight other people in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in 1982.

In its most recent ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, overturned the death sentence on the ground that the jury's sentencing instructions violated a 1988 Supreme Court decision holding that jurors did not have to agree unanimously on the existence of "mitigating circumstances" that could weigh against that state's argument for death.

The question now for the Supreme Court in the state's appeal, Beard v. Banks, No. 02-1603, is whether the appeals court's retroactive application of the 1988 ruling was correct. Although the question is a narrow one, it has both practical and doctrinal implications, affecting as many as 30 inmates on Pennsylvania's death row and also requiring guidance from the justices on how federal courts are to apply Supreme Court rulings that expand state defendants' rights.

The Supreme Court has ruled that decisions announcing a "new rule" cannot be applied retroactively in federal habeas corpus proceedings, which are the only means by which state inmates can get their cases before a federal judge. So the question is how to decide when a decision is a "new rule" or simply an application of an old rule, and specifically whether the 1988 sentencing decision, Mills v. Maryland, announced a new rule.