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Last month, the Supreme Court held arguments in Olivier v. City of Brandon, a little-discussed case out of the controversial 5th Circuit that sounded, at first, like it would boil down to familiar ideological flashpoints. An evangelical preacher challenged a city ordinance under the First and 14th amendments that confined protesters to a designated zone outside a public amphitheater in Brandon, Mississippi. After the city’s police chief restricted where and how he could speak outside the theater, the preacher was cited, paid a fine, and later sued to prevent the city from enforcing the ordinance against him again.

But inside the courtroom, the argument barely touched speech or religion. Instead, the justices together gravitated toward something else entirely: a problem about time, causation, and whether constitutional authority can be temporally partitioned. Does the Constitution operate only forward? Can a law be unconstitutional tomorrow yet legally untouchable yesterday? And can a single conviction permanently close the courthouse doors to the people most harmed by an unconstitutional rule?

Those questions animated nearly every exchange. The court was wrestling not with what the First Amendment protects, but with whether constitutional rights can be exhausted by a single successful act of punishment.

The case turns on Heck v. Humphrey, a 1994 decision holding that civil rights lawsuits cannot be used to undermine the validity of a still-standing criminal conviction. The idea........

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