That's almost unthinkable to lawyers whose practice centers around torts; but it's not an unusual situation in the First Amendment area. That was the tenor of the questions by Justice Scalia, as well as by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan (participating with visible buoyancy in her first really cool case). Justice Alito (the lone dissenter in the animal-video case) seemed sympathetic to Mr. Snyder; so did Justice Breyer, who asked Summers to help him formulate a rule of law that would permit recovery for outrageous statements about private figures on the Web or broadcast TV. Summers didn't have a rule ready.

Then it was Margie Phelps's turn. She looks a lot like someone who would come to your door selling tracts during the baseball playoffs, and her grim, whispery monotone is what I imagine Norman Bates's mother sounded like.

None of that should have mattered; a competent second-year law student could have handled it. One would simply concede that Mr. Snyder is a private person. The issue is the kind of speech. The WBC's speech, disagreeable though it might be to the majority, was aimed at issues of American social and military policy. This kind of speech is fully protected by the First Amendment. Nothing in WBC's signs was directed at Matthew or Albert Snyder personally. Church members never approached the funeral or tried to disrupt it with noise; they did not interact with Mr. Snyder, who never even saw the signs until he read news reports; the "epic" was not sent to Mr. Snyder, simply published on the Internet. Under these circumstances, letting a jury assess a multimillion-dollar verdict is plainly permitting punishment for a distasteful message on a question of public importance. The Snyders' pain is the kind of pain free speech requires us to bear.

Thank you. Sit down.

But Margie Phelps spent most of her time arguing that Mr. Snyder is a public figure because he and his family had spoken to the news media about their grief for their dead son and their horror at the war in which he died. All he had to do was keep absolutely quiet. By making any public comment after Matthew's death, they became fair game for WBC. Over and over the Justices suggested, asked, begged her to assume that Mr. Snyder was not a public figure. Please, they seemed to be saying, we're not buying it, give us some other reason to vote for you. Over and over she refused."They step[ped] into a public discussion," she said.

They had it coming.

The unease on the bench was palpable. Perhaps most significantly, Justice Kennedy, the swing vote, asked whether WBC could simply "follow a particular person around, making that person the target of your comments." Phelps's answer was, in essence, I already told you they had it coming.

It may be that Margie Phelps by the hour's end had not kicked away her case. But her argument was so poor that I found myself wondering whether she even wanted to win. WBC is quite frank about hating everything about the United States--everything, that is, except the First Amendment. "The Supreme Court will remind this nation that you don't have mob rule," Margie Phelps told CNN last March.