Snyder v. Phelps decided (PDF)

Haven’t read the full ruling yet, but the upshot is that the Court ruled 8-1 (Alito dissenting) that the actions of Phelps and company are protected under the First Amendment.

Edit:
Having reviewed the opinions, the reasoning of the court can basically be summed up as follows:
First, the protests were on a public concern (Basically, all the things that the Westboro Baptist Church feel are issues with the current state of morality in the U.S.) in a public location with the goal of spreading the message to the public. Matthew Snyder was not the direct target of the picketing, but, rather, his funeral was simply being used as a means to gain media exposure. While the content of the speech in question was extremely offensive and hurtful, that alone is not grounds to lose the protection of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

Phelps and the rest of the picketers did not break any laws in place at the time when they performed their picketing. They informed the police ahead of time and remained in the area designated for the picketing. The picketing went on without any physical violence, yelling, or profanity. The services were not disrupted by the picketing. As such, there is no case to be made that these actions should not be protected based on exceptions that can limit this sort of picketing “subject to reasonable time, place, or manner restrictions.”, since all restrictions in place at the time were followed. As the Court found that the picketing did not disrupt the funeral, kept its distance from it, and that the messages on the signs were not visible to the father, this was not a case of a captive audience.

With all this in mind, the Court affirmed the ruling of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Alito’s dissent seems, to me, to be very similar to the one he wrote in the 8-1 ruling on United States v. Stevens last year (The animal cruelty one), in that it’s rather long on appeals to emotion and, quite honestly, pretty short on thoughtful First Amendment analysis. It appears to further confirm the view that Alito is, by far, the current Justice with the most narrow view of what types of speech are protected by the First Amendment. This may not be the last time we see him on the losing end of an 8-1 Free Speech Clause case.

Overall, I see it as a fairly narrow ruling that mostly just reaffirms what was generally considered to be current state of First Amendment law. I say this because the facts of the case were pretty largely in favor of Phelps and the WBC. They broke no laws, they were peaceful, they were speaking on a topic that can be seen as being of the public concern (To them, at least) and which they have been protesting and picketing about for years, and they didn’t disrupt the services. It seems quite possible that the main reason the Court accepted this appeal was the large amount of publicity around it, as they voted 8-1 to affirm and I am unaware of an circuit split on this issue.

Even though I can not stand Phelps or his ilk and I am extremely sympathetic to the Snyders in this case, I agree with the ruling. In order to have freedom of speech, we need to let in offensive and hateful speech as well. The solution to this kind of speech is to counter it with speech of our own, even if we’d rather be able to just use the law to shut them up.