... in the behavior of your program there shouldn't be a difference as you stated already.
But it would be interesting to see, if byte code differs?
I guess it doesn't, because sun's compiler should recognize that this is a final static field, i.e. a constant.
But anyway, even this doesn't probably relate to your question,
most
IDE's would issue a warning if you use latter code
and sun also highly recommends to use the first statement instead.