Snyder v. Phelps

Justice Alito is more coherent than Kennedy, more conventional than Thomas, more consistently conservative than Roberts, and a lot further from retirement or death than Scalia.

This is a pretty cray-cray amicus brief in the Supreme Court. When there are more citations to the Bible than to case law, you know something's up.

It might interest you to know that if I were still an active justice, I would have joined [Justice Alito’s] powerful dissent in the recent case holding that the intentional infliction of severe emotional harm is constitutionally protected speech. The case… involved a verbal assault on the private citizens attending the funeral of their son […]

The Supreme Court just handed down its decision in the Westboro Baptist Church case, Snyder v. Phelps. The court ruled, 8-1, that the father of a slain Marine could not successfully sue the Westboro church in tort for protesting during his son’s funeral. Call it Free Speech 101. The hard part about the First Amendment […]

[A]ll of us in a pluralistic society have components to our identity; we are Republicans or Democrats, we are Christians or atheists, we are single or married, we are old or young. — Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, waxing poetic at oral argument in Snyder v. Phelps (via Jan Crawford).