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This file photo taken on Aug. 1, 2015, shows the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Jan. 30, 2017.KAREN BLEIER/AFP / Getty Images

Donald J. Trump, who in a year-long presidential campaign reshaped American politics and who in a week in the White House has reshaped the American profile in trade, health care and immigration, is about to give shape to American law – and, with it, American society and culture – for decades.

Mr. Trump is expected to announce his choice Tuesday night to fill a rare vacancy on the Supreme Court, which now is divided evenly between four Democrats and four Republicans. The three apparent finalists for the job are all regarded as conservatives, reflecting the new President's campaign pledge to select a jurist who would replicate the intellectual vigour and ideological instincts of Antonin Scalia, the strict constructionist and devout conservative who died a year ago.

"This is a vitally important American moment and a vitally significant appointment," said David Richard Herwitz, emeritus law professor at Harvard University. "This appointment could shape American life for generations, not only on the high-profile issues of abortion and guns, but also on the more subtle factors that define the way Americans conduct their personal and business lives."

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Supreme Court nominations once were regarded as the sole prerogative of the president and were routinely approved by the Senate. In the past half-century, however, the confirmation proceedings have become increasingly contentious, with deeply partisan questioning from members of the Judiciary Committee, which vets judicial selections, and with bitter public battles over the nominations. Since 1968, Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan each twice failed to win confirmation for their selections, and one selection by George W. Bush was withdrawn.

The passions, and the stakes, are even higher today. Mr. Scalia died last February, and then-president Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy, but the Republicans who control the Senate refused even to hold hearings on the selection. This infuriated Democrats, who in turn have promised equally obstructionist tactics once Mr. Trump makes his choice.

Despite the enormous attention being placed on this selection, Mr. Trump will not in a single moment transform the court. Instead, he very likely will restore the ideological profile that prevailed before the death of Mr. Scalia, at least for the time being. "'The situation that was in operation a year ago will simply be replicated,"' said Kenneth Gormley, a onetime dean of the Duquesne Law School and now the president of the Pittsburgh university. "That will be the case no matter which one of these jurists the president selects."

Even so, Supreme Court justices serve for life and many have drifted ideologically once installed in the high court, sometimes surprising the presidents who nominated them and the Senate that confirmed them. George H.W. Bush, for example, nominated David H. Souter of New Hampshire for a Supreme Court vacancy after being assured the Harvard-educated jurist, who lived an ascetic life in a rural village, was devoutly conservative. Mr. Souter astonished court observers, and infuriated conservatives, when he helped affirm abortion rights in a celebrated 1992 decision. Since then, judicial analysts have been chary to predict the behaviour of Supreme Court justices.

The three finalists are three U.S. circuit court judges, Neil Gorsuch, Thomas M. Hardiman, and William H. Pryor Jr. All three met with Mr. Trump before Inauguration day.

"All of these men are clearly intellectual leaders and are particularly good at their craft," Mr. Gormley said. "Any one of them will have an enormous impact on the court from the first moment they sit there. But because they are relatively young, any one of them will be an important voice for a long, long time."

Mr. Gorsuch, 49 years old, is from Colorado, a swing state Mr. Trump lost in November. Mr. Hardiman, 51, is from Pennsylvania, a swing state the President carried, and Mr. Pryor, 54, is from Alabama, a onetime Democratic stronghold that has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980.

Mr. Gorsuch is regarded as a strong candidate. He is the son of Anne Gorsuch Burford, who was the controversial head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Mr. Reagan; she was a lighting rod for bitter criticism from the very sorts of liberal activists who would oppose any Trump nominee but who will mobilize with particular fervour against Mrs. Burford's son, particularly since he has upheld religious liberty rights in cases involving Obamacare. Mr. Gorsuch, who holds degrees form Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, was a clerk for two Supreme Court justices, Byron White, a liberal appointed by John F. Kennedy, and Anthony Kennedy, a conservative-leaning moderate appointed by Mr. Reagan.

But Mr. Hardiman, from the Pittsburgh suburbs, now is regarded as the leading candidate. Pennsylvania was an indispensable part of the Trump electoral coalition, and Democrats would have a difficult time opposing him; he married into a prominent southwestern Pennsylvania Democratic family and was confirmed to his current position on a 95-0 vote by the Senate. With degrees from the University of Notre Dame and Georgetown University, he would restore the 6-3 Catholic majority on the high court but would end the Ivy League monopoly there – a potentially appealing factor for Mr. Trump, who holds an Ivy degree (University of Pennsylvania, class of 1968) but who cultivates an anti-elitist image.

Mr. Hardiman serves on the same court as Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, who is Mr. Trump's sister. She now has assumed senior status, a form of semi-retirement favoured by many judges over age 65. "He was a superstar from the very beginning," Mr. Gormley said of Mr. Hardiman. The two first met when Mr. Gormley, who was in charge of recruitment at a top Pittsburgh law firm, interviewed Mr. Hardiman for a position.

He was hired – and may now be on the verge of yet another hiring, if Democrats allow the nomination to reach the Senate floor for a vote.

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