WASHINGTON—Free speech stands front and center in the Supreme Court term beginning next week, in a pair of cases testing the First Amendment's reach in the digital age.

On Oct. 6, the justices will weigh whether the First Amendment protects a Kansas church's campaign to publicize its beliefs by picketing military funerals with vulgar placards and insulting fallen soldiers' survivors in online screeds.


On the Docket

Some cases the Supreme Court has agreed to hear in its 2010-11 term, with the date of argument. Click to expand graphic.


Both cases add digital twists to constitutional doctrine. The church's Internet posting potentially exposes the entire world to its hurtful attack, while the videogame laws single out computer role-playing as uniquely dangerous to children while leaving violent music, films, comic books and other media unrestricted.

The Roberts Court's record on free-speech cases makes it hard to predict the outcome. It voted 8-1 earlier this year to strike down a federal law that banned depictions of animal cruelty, finding the ban too broad. At the same time, it curtailed First Amendment rights for minors in 2007, ruling that school officials could suppress a student placard that referred to marijuana.

The court has put about 40 cases on its docket for the new term, which runs through June, and is expected to add a similar number in coming months. Besides the free-speech cases, several scheduled arguments touch ideological fault lines, including challenges to two state laws enacted by Arizona's conservative legislature.

For its first case on opening day, Oct. 4, however, the court has slotted a mundane bankruptcy dispute, giving a low-pressure debut to retired Justice John Paul Stevens's successor, Elena Kagan.

Justice Kagan, 50 years old, was a Supreme Court clerk but has never before been a judge. Because her previous job as solicitor general involved her in formulating government positions in cases now before the Supreme Court, she has recused herself from about half of the docketed cases.

For that reason, she will be sitting out Dec. 8 arguments involving the clash between Arizona and Washington over immigration. A 2008 Arizona law penalizes employers for hiring illegal aliens and requires them to check applicants' status through E-Verify, a database operated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

A rare alliance of business groups, civil-rights advocates and the Obama administration argues that the state law is pre-empted by federal law, in part because Congress made E-Verify voluntary and set more lenient penalties for hiring unauthorized workers.

The Supreme Court's decision could foreshadow the fate of another Arizona law, passed this year, which directs police to stop suspected illegal aliens and arrest those without valid papers. That measure, like the 2008 law, is on hold as courts weigh arguments that it interferes with federal law.

A separate Arizona dispute involves a state program that gives taxpayers a 100% tax credit for contributions to nonprofit organizations created to fund private or parochial schools. Because contributions can be earmarked for specific children (other than their own) at a particular school, the program effectively lets taxpayers decide whether to send money to the state treasury or apply the same amount to tuition for a friend or relative. In practice, the beneficiaries overwhelmingly have been religious schools.

Arizona says the program expands educational choices, and that individuals—not the state—decide whether to subsidize religious or secular schools. Challengers contend it's a device to evade the constitutional ban on government establishment of religion.

The case, to be argued Nov. 3, offers the court's increasingly assertive conservative majority a chance to reconsider a 1968 precedent they long have criticized, Flast v. Cohen. Taxpayers normally can't sue the government unless they personally have been injured, but Flast provided an exception for Establishment Clause violations, reasoning that otherwise there would be no judicial remedy when the government subsidizes religion with public funds.

The court generally prefers to chip away at precedents it finds problematic. But in January, the conservative wing led by Chief Justice John Roberts struck down restrictions on corporate political spending, overruling decades of case law. This term may show if the court is willing to take such dramatic moves in other areas.

Some of the biggest issues in the federal courts—including the constitutionality of the new federal health-care law and the proposed right to same-sex marriage—aren't likely to reach the Supreme Court in the 2010-11 term.

"This term has a fair numbers of interesting cases, but the earth-shattering ones are still on the horizon," said Washington litigator Tom Goldstein, publisher of Scotusblog.com, a website that tracks the Supreme Court.

Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com