WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court cast aside a broad challenge to federal limits on abortion clinic protests as its 1995-96 term began Monday with a blizzard of paperwork but without the chief justice.

Giving a big victory to abortion rights advocates, the court let stand rulings that said the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act does not infringe on anyone’s freedom of expression or religion.

The court also refused to let the Portland, Maine, Housing Authority ban guns from crime-ridden public housing projects.

The justices, without comment, left intact a ruling by Maine’s highest court that said a state law blocks the housing authority from enforcing such a ban.

With Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist home recuperating from back surgery, the court turned away more than 1,500 appeals.

In other action Monday, the court:

Ruled that the way Tennessee elects the 33 members of its state Senate does not illegally dilute black voters’ political strength. Black voters had argued that a 1992 redistricting plan violated the federal Voting Rights Act.

Refused to allow a class-action lawsuit by hemophiliacs who say they acquired the AIDS virus from blood-clotting medicines manufactured by four companies.

Steered clear of a Pennsylvania dispute over states’ duty to release from nursing homes those people willing and able to live in private homes if they get state-paid “attendant care.” The justices never have studied closely the scope of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Rejected the appeal of a professor ousted as chairman of a New York college’s black-studies department after he was accused of making a bigoted and anti-Semitic speech.

Refused to hear an appeal by Charles Keating, convicted of fraud and racketeering in the most expensive savings and loan failure in U.S. history. Keating had sought review of rulings that require him to repay $36.4 million to the collapsed Lincoln Savings & Loan.

The challenged abortion clinic law makes it a crime for anyone to block, hinder or intimidate someone who seeks to enter.

Although Monday’s action was not a ruling — and therefore not necessarily the definitive word on the law’s validity — it was a key setback for anti-abortion activists.

Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice called the court’s action “very disappointing,” but said his organization would continue challenging the federal law.

Deborah Ellis of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund welcomed the action benefiting the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. “FACE has been effective in reducing the onslaught of violence to which women, doctors and their families have been subjected,” she said.

Lower courts had ruled in a case from Virginia that Congress, in passing the clinic access law, had acted within its authority to regulate interstate commerce.

The anti-abortion American Life League sued Attorney General Janet Reno last year in an effort to block enforcement of FACE.

The Supreme Court last June rejected a challenge to FACE by the Concerned Women for America, but it had not raised the interstate commerce issue.

The Portland gun possession case goes back to the early 1970s, when the city’s housing authority received many complaints about unsafe conditions, including gun possession by tenants. About 2,700 people live in the city’s public housing projects.

Problems were so severe that postal agents, firefighters and social service workers refused to enter some projects without a police escort.

The housing authority in 1975 required tenants to sign leases that barred possession of guns, and made any violation of that provision grounds for automatic termination of the lease.

A married couple, identified in court documents by the fictitious names John and Jane Doe, sued the housing authority in 1992 over the gun ban.

The Does have lived in a Portland public housing development called Sagamore Village since 1981. He is a former firearms dealer and a licensed hunter. She has used handguns for 27 years and target shoots at a gun club.

Doe works nights, and Mrs. Doe says she fears for her safety while he is away.

They sued so they could remain in their home and continue owning handguns and hunting rifles. Their lawsuit contended that a state law regulating guns pre-empted the housing authority’s policy.

The Maine law says, in part, “Any existing or future order, ordinance, rule or regulation in this field of any political subdivision of the state is void.”

A state judge threw out the Does’ lawsuit after ruling that the law did not apply to housing authorities.

But the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled last April that the judge was wrong.