After the suit was filed, the government changed its rationale for excluding Professor Ramadan, now saying that he had contributed about $1,300 to a charity in Switzerland from 1998 to 2002. That charity, later designated a terrorist organization by the Treasury Department, in turn made contributions to Hamas, which had already been designated one. Professor Ramadan’s second-hand contribution amounted to material support for terrorism, the government said.

Excluding Professor Ramadan “in no way restricts speech,” government lawyers wrote in a brief in the case in May. He remains free to say what he likes, they continued, and Americans remain free to hear what he has to say. Just not in person in the United States.

Judge Paul A. Crotty — a federal district judge in Manhattan who was New York City’s chief lawyer under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani — will hold a hearing in the case on Thursday. In an earlier decision, he said the principles at stake were crucial ones.

“The First Amendment includes not only a right to speak, but also a right to receive information and ideas,” Judge Crotty wrote last year. That includes a right, he continued, quoting a Supreme Court decision, “to have an alien enter and to hear him explain and seek to defend his views.”

Lawyers for the defendants in the television case, Javed Iqbal and Saleh Elahwal, say the case against them, similarly, is “nothing less than a full frontal assault on the fundamental values inscribed in the First Amendment.” The men are charged with providing material support to Hezbollah, the radical Islamic Shiite group in Lebanon, by making its television station, Al Manar, available in the United States.

In a brief filed in July, the government said, in an echo of the Ramadan case, that the satellite case was only about business dealings and “has nothing to do with speech, expression or advocacy,” adding that “the defendants remain free to speak out in favor of Hezbollah and its political objectives.” But they may not transmit Al Manar’s message.