WASHINGTON – A 20-year-old legal fight over protests outside abortion clinics ended Tuesday with the Supreme Court ruling that federal extortion and racketeering laws cannot be used against demonstrators.

The 8-0 decision was a setback for abortion clinics that were buoyed when the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals kept their case alive two years ago despite the high court’s 2003 ruling that had cleared the way for lifting a nationwide injunction on anti-abortion leader Joseph Scheidler and others.

Anti-abortion groups appealed to the justices after the lower court sought to determine whether the injunction could be supported by findings that protesters had made threats of violence.

In Tuesday’s ruling, Justice Stephen Breyer said Congress did not create “a freestanding physical violence offense” in the federal extortion law known as the Hobbs Act.

Instead, Breyer wrote, Congress addressed violence outside abortion clinics in 1994 by passing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which allows for court injunctions to set limits for such protests.

“It’s a great day for pro-lifers,” said Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue.

Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said the decision was disappointing because the injunction had decreased violence outside clinics nationally.

She said the clinic access act is problematic because it requires abortion providers to seek injunctions “city by city” and turns back the clock to the late ’80s when NOW played cat and mouse with Operation Rescue in trying to anticipate the cities and clinics that abortion protesters planned to target next.

Newman said his group and others have set their sights on the clinic access law, filing legal challenges they hope will lead courts to overturn it.