Image via WikipediaSupreme Court Term Offers Hot Issues and Future Hints - NYTimes.comWASHINGTON — The new Supreme Court term, which begins Monday, includes cases on some of the most contested issues of the day, including protests at military funerals, illegal immigration, support for religious schools, violent video games, DNA evidence and prosecutorial misconduct.
The term’s arguments and decisions will be scrutinized for insights into the thinking of the court’s newest member, Justice Elena Kagan, and for hints about how the court will rule when even more highly charged cases reach it, probably in a year or two, on federal health care legislation, same-sex marriage, the treatment of gay members of the armed services and the recent Arizona law giving the police there greater authority to check the immigration status of people they stop.
The marquee case on the docket so far is a suit brought by the father of a fallen Marine against a small Kansas church whose members protested at his son’s funeral. The case, to be argued Wednesday, is freighted with rage on both sides.
“Since when did any of our military die so that a group of people could target their families and harass them?” asked the Marine’s father, Albert Snyder, who won an $11 million jury verdict against the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., saying the church had caused him emotional distress.
An appeals court threw out the award on First Amendment grounds, saying the signs carried by the protesters — featuring messages like “God Hates Fags” — were not directed at the Marine, Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder, or meant to convey factual assertions about him, but were instead protected commentary on matters of public concern.
Mr. Snyder said that ruling was perilous. “If the law can’t help us and the courts won’t do something,” he said, “someone is going to take this into his own hands.”
Margie J. Phelps, a daughter of the pastor of the church, will argue the case in the Supreme Court. She agrees that the case arrives at the Supreme Court at a volatile moment.
“We are a little church in the middle of the country that will not back down from the mob rule mentality that has taken over this country,” she said. “We are bringing the words of life and faith to a nation threatened with destruction.”
Rodney A. Smolla, the president of Furman University in Greenville, S.C., and an authority on the First Amendment, said the court’s decision to hear the case, Snyder v. Phelps, No. 09-751, indicates that “some number of justices would at least entertain the idea that special circumstances such as grief at funerals may warrant an exception to a robust conception of free speech in the general marketplace.”
Mr. Smolla added that aspects of the case were reminiscent of the controversy over the proposed Islamic center near ground zero in New York. While the law may treat the site of a terrorist attack and a military funeral differently, he said, “the cultural feeling is that each is close to a sacred space.”
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 21 news organizations, including The New York Times Company, filed a brief supporting the Kansas church. “To silence a fringe messenger because of the distastefulness of the message,” the brief said, “is antithetical to the First Amendment’s most basic precepts.”
In a second major First Amendment case, Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association, No. 08-1448, the court will decide whether states may restrict the sale of violent video games to minors. The lower courts in the case and many courts considering similar questions have uniformly said no.
Indeed, the Supreme Court has never extended to violent materials the principles that allow the regulation of sexual materials. But the justices agreed to hear the video games case in April, just days after striking down a federal law making it a crime to sell dogfight videos and other depictions of animal cruelty.
The court’s business docket will be busy, too. After a one-year hiatus, the court will resume its scrutiny of an issue that often divides conservatives: who should prevail in tensions between federal and state efforts to regulate matters like vaccines, seat belts and arbitration?
“This is the issue that separates business conservatives and states’ rights conservatives,” said Catherine M. Sharkey, a law professor at New York University.
Business groups generally say there should be a national standard rather than a patchwork of state and local laws. But conservatives committed to federalism say that states have an independent role in regulating products and practices that could harm their residents.
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