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Part #1: The Arguments -- “Why don’t they just test the damned evidence?” The day of death had arrived. Wednesday, March 24. A light rain began to fall as the prison van transported Henry Skinner to Huntsville. Skinner writes:  Damn, what a bunch of guns. You ain’t never seen so many high tech weapons in your life. Red necks flaunting their toys.  All down the gauntlet were all kinds of officers, civilian personnel, all lined up to see me off. It was easy to tell who was supportive, who was sad to see what was happening and who had the hater attitude (“Die, Skinner, die!”). I just kept my head high and laughed.

Commentary When the Supreme Court meets in private Friday to discuss Snyder v. Phelps, a profound question will hang over the discussion: Should we -- and can we -- set aside our emotional reaction?  If the answer, implicit or otherwise, is no, the Justices may then proceed to craft a way to write into the First Amendment a  "funeral exception" to the right to speak out in public in outrageous and hurtful ways.  It was apparent, throughout an hour of oral argument Wednesday, that emotion was more dominant than law, at least among most of the Justices.  Perhaps typically, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who did seem to want to talk about legal principles, could not keep from pronouncing that "this is a case about exploiting a private family's grief. Why should the First Amendment tolerate that?"

The Supreme Court will seek to sort out the breadth of free speech, when the expression takes the form of a harshly worded protest staged near the scene of a private funeral for a soldier killed in a foreign war zone. The case of...

On Tuesday, in Los Angeles County v. Humphries, the Court will hear oral argument regarding whether a plaintiff who seeks declaratory relief for the violation of his rights by a local government entity must show that the violation resulted from a government policy, and whether the plaintiff can be a "prevailing party" for purposes of receiving attorney's fees under federal civil rights laws if he cannot make such a showing.  Steven D. Schwinn of the John Marshall Law School previews the case for the American Bar Association’s PREVIEW of U.S. Supreme Court Cases; the ABA has generously agreed to share some of its previews – which are authored by practitioners and scholars in the field – with SCOTUSblog.  You can read Professor Schwinn’s preview here; PREVIEW’s website is here.

Jessica Fitts, an Akin Gump summer associate and a third-year student at Harvard Law School, previews Connick v. Thompson, which is scheduled for oral argument on Wednesday....