OTTAWA - Madame Justice Claire L'Heureux-Dubé, whose 15 years on the Supreme Court of Canada confronted the country with a bold rethinking of constitutional rights and the role of the state in their protection, retired yesterday.

The second woman to sit on the top court, she leaves behind an intellectual legacy admirers say heralds the future of Western legal philosophy and critics depict as a threat to the very foundations of Anglo-Canadian legal tradition.

Perhaps the most controversial and frequently misunderstood judge on the nine-member court, the Quebec City native is best known for her willingness to uphold the rights of women, children, gays and lesbians and racial minorities -- and to limit the rights of accused criminals.

On the surface, her jurisprudence appears rife with contradiction: the judicial activist who was willing to strike down legislation that infringed on equality rights was also the deferential judge who sided with the government in criminal cases and, in the words of one defence lawyer, ''Never met a Crown attorney she didn't like.''

Her jurisprudence defied labels such as liberal or conservative, activist or deferential, but her decisions were hardly arbitrary.

A close look at her reasoning reveals a coherent philosophical approach that will continue to confront the court long after her departure.

Rather than interpreting constitutional rights as individual rights to be asserted against the state, Judge L'Heureux-Dubé recast the state as a protector of such rights. She insisted the state had the duty to balance individual rights, including the traditional rights of due process and fair trial, against the collective rights of groups she perceived as vulnerable, including women, children and racial minorities.

She dissented in the 1991 Seaboyer decision on Canada's rape shield law, which protected sexual assault complainants from having to reveal their prior sexual history in court. The majority of the court struck down the law as a violation of an accused's right to fair trial. The dissent called on the government to balance women's privacy rights with the legal rights of accused rapists -- and influenced Parliament to draft a new law that was eventually upheld by the court.

(She also authored a dissent in a case concerning the use of psychiatric records of sexual assault complainants. In that case, her dissent was used by Parliament as a guide to drafting a new law that would balance privacy rights of alleged victims with the legal rights of accused criminals.)

She authored decisions allowing special protections for children, such as the option of testifying at sexual assault trials using a video camera and from behind screens, despite complaints the devices would prevent effective cross-examination.

In recent years, she also dissented in a decision that restricted the use of strip searches by police.

In the 2001 Sharpe decision, she would have upheld the law against child pornography without allowing the exceptions that the majority of high court judges said were necessary to protect freedom of expression.

Her admirers celebrated her attempts to push the ''rights revolution'' -- traditionally concerned with scrutinizing public policy for its treatment of women and minorities -- into the criminal realm. But critics said she was dressing up conservative crime control measures in progressive language and warned of the risk of wrongful conviction.

''The use of the Charter to balance rights which are now all accorded equal weight, threatens to erode the fundamental concepts of the rights of the accused which had been at the heart of the criminal justice system,'' said defence lawyer Edward Greenspan in a speech last year.

''Nowhere is this erosion clearer than in the context of the introduction of prior sexual history of a complainant in a sexual assault case,'' he said.

Judge L'Heureux-Dubé's creative reasoning and eloquent opinions had the powerful effect of making tough-on-crime legislation seem ''progressive,'' said Kent Roach, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Toronto.

He said her approach appealed to parties from across the political spectrum, from B.C.'s former NDP government to the Canadian Alliance, and the governing federal Liberals.

''On the criminal justice front, she had more influence on Parliament than on the court,'' he said.

Her approach was not only frequently in sync with the arguments of women's groups, but also with the ''victim's rights''movement that has many adherents on the conservative side of the political spectrum.

''A lot of her ideas were about this fusion of crime control, equality and victims' rights. It was the legislative branch that was more receptive to these ideas, and receptive in a way that cuts across the political spectrum,'' said Prof. Roach.

''I don't think the results are necessarily new,'' said Prof. Roach, who calls the limitation of legal rights as a throwback to pre-Charter era. ''But the rationale for the results is definitely new. It makes the criminal sanction seem progressive. It makes it a good thing -- and I would question that.''

But others say Judge L'Heureux-Dubé's desire to balance rights reflects a movement in the law that is taking place in many countries whose constitutions were written after the Second World War.

''She had a very clear vision of the importation of the human rights revolution of the post-war world into Canadian law,'' said Lorraine Weinrib, constitutional law professor at the University of Toronto.

''It is a new view that modern rights-protecting instruments [like the Charter] don't just negate state power,'' she said. ''The old idea was that rights were held against the state. The modern welfare state can't operate on that paradigm.''

Errol Mendes, constitutional law professor at the University of Ottawa, said Judge L'Heureux-Dubé forced the court and lawmakers to confront a theory of collective rights.

''She is basically forcing the courts and the legal profession to deal with collective rights -- something the Anglo-Canadian profession is very, very uncomfortable with. In U.S. jurisprudence, you would be very hard-pressed to come up against this issue,'' said Prof. Mendes.

''She finds the balance more on the side of collective rights,'' he said. ''It's shaking the foundations of a tradition that pits the legal rights of the accused against the state,'' he said.

This emerging intellectual reconfiguration of rights and of the role of the state was in evidence in the debate over Canada's post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorist legislation. Traditional civil libertarians argued the law would violate Charter rights, such as freedom of association and expression, and that new police powers would violate the freedom from self-incrimination, for example.

The law's intellectual defenders, led by Irwin Cotler, the human rights activist and legal scholar turned Liberal MP, whose ideas were later quoted by Anne McLellan, then the justice minister, when she justified the government's anti-terrorism law, called on democratic countries to ''rethink or reconfigure counter-terrorism as human rights foreign policy.''

Mr. Cotler argued against the conventional thinking of individual civil liberties versus the state, and attempted to redefine the terms of debate as the rights of accused terrorists against the collective right of ''human security.''

While Judge L'Heureux-Dubé has not expressed an opinion on the anti-terrorism measures, the attempt at ''reconfiguration'' is similar.

''She saw not just a right to keep the state off her back, but a right to enjoy security and equality,'' said Prof. Roach.

Judge L'Heureux-Dubé, born in 1927, was educated at a convent school and completed her law degree at Laval University. She pursued a legal career at a time when women were not welcome, and her experience as a family law lawyer, and later a family court judge, confronted her with the inequalities faced by women in Quebec in the 1950s. She has said that upon arriving at the top court in 1987, one of the male judges refused to speak to her for three months as a ''probation.''

But while the equality of women was a central concern of Judge L'Heureux-Dubé's throughout her career, she was not as consistent in following feminist ideology as some critics have suggested.

In the 2000 decision of KLW v. Winnipeg Child and Family Services, for example, she rejected the feminist arguments embraced by Beverley McLachlin, the Chief Justice, and Louise Arbour, that the warrantless removal of a newborn infant from a mother was an unconstitutional violation of the woman's security of the person. Judge L'Heureux-Dubé, for the majority, argued that due process had to be limited to protect the infant from a mother who had proven dangerous to her other children.

The vulnerability of victims was the thread that wound through all her decisions. She was willing to rely on social science evidence to evaluate the impact of laws, and even on the criminal justice system itself and on various groups. For example, she would have struck down mandatory retirement laws on the grounds that women have fewer years in the labour force to build up pensions.

A former law clerk described the judge as sleeping only a few hours per night, in between court work (she wrote 254 decisions, 40% of them in dissent), checking the accuracy of the court's French-English translations, keeping up with the latest developments in research, and her early morning swims at a downtown hotel pool.

She was involved with international legal organizations and forged friendships with judges on foreign constitutional courts. She often emphasized the importance of international treaties and human rights conventions in interpreting domestic law.

In an influential dissent in a 1995 case known as Egan, in which Judge L'Heureux-Dubé would have allowed gay men to be considered spouses, she wrote that the international human rights concept of equal human dignity was key to analyzing equality rights claims under the Charter. Her approach to equality was later adopted by the South African constitutional court and was endorsed unanimously in the Supreme Court of Canada's landmark 1999 case called Law.

Her ideas will live on in the legal consciousness of Canada, said Prof. Mendes.

''As law professors, we don't just teach the majority decisions. We teach dissents,'' he said.

Her decisions in criminal law were often joined by Mr. Justice Charles Gonthier, who will also retire this summer, and Mr. Justice Michel Bastarache, who remains on the court.

When the Chrétien government chooses a replacement for the retiring judges, categories of left-right or activist/deference will be inadequate in evaluating whether the successor to Judge L'Heureux-Dubé will continue her legacy. That will depend on the judge's willingness to''reconfigure'' Charter rights.