ON OCTOBER 7th the Supreme Court heard its first religious-liberty case since recognising, in June, the right of some pious employers not to pay for some types of birth control for their staff. This time, in Holt v Hobbs, the aggrieved party is Gregory Holt, a Muslim inmate in Arkansas who says his faith requires him to wear a half-inch beard. Arkansas forbids this, arguing that a beard could be used to hide drugs, blades or telephone SIM cards.

Mr Holt, who was jailed for breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s house and slitting her throat, says he is in a “state of war” with the prison barber. He argues that the ban on beards violates his rights under a law that says prisons may only impinge on inmates’ religious lives if there is a “compelling governmental interest” at stake and they use the “least restrictive means” of pursuing it. He notes that Arkansas allows quarter-inch beards for inmates with skin conditions, and that 43 other states allow them for all prisoners.

At the oral argument, the justices groped for a legal principle that would save them from approaching “these cases half-inch by half-inch”, as Justice Antonin Scalia put it. Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia, arguing for Mr Holt, proposed that prison rules deserve more deference if they are “well-considered”. The justices seemed unconvinced by those of Arkansas. “[W]hy can’t the prison just give the inmate a comb...If there’s a SIM card in there or...a tiny revolver”, Justice Samuel Alito hammed, “it’ll fall out.”

Back in 1999, when Mr Alito was a mere circuit judge, he ruled that Newark could not bar two Muslim police officers from growing pious beards. On Tuesday he was no friendlier to the Arkansas contention that shifting facial-hair patterns make inmates unrecognisable to prison officials. When the state’s lawyer, David Curran, warned that a bearded inmate “could get into the barracks where he is not supposed to be” after working out in the fields, Mr Alito was merciless: “While he’s out there, he shaves, then he wants to come back and go into barracks B. And how’s he going to get into barracks B if he has an ID that says barracks A? Now you say he’s going to trade with another prisoner? Then he will have a different picture on the ID...they’re going to alter the IDs also while they’re out there in the fields?” Mr Curran replied: “Prisoners are capable of doing a lot of mischief.” A ruling is expected by June.