Justices Reinstate Smith's Claim

That is vigorously denied by Pierce, who notes that a jury agreed with his version of events when a Texas state probate court ruled for him in 2001.

In 1996, Smith filed for bankruptcy in a California federal court. Pierce jumped into the bankruptcy case, telling the judge that her assets could not be divided up without giving some to him as compensation for her allegedly libelous accusations of cheating on the estate.

But Pierce's intervention in the otherwise routine bankruptcy may have been a tactical error as it gave Smith an opening to file a counter-claim of "tortious interference" by Pierce with J. Howard's intended gift.

In 2000, the bankruptcy judge agreed with Smith, awarding her $474 million in damages; in 2002, a federal district judge reviewed the case and also backed Smith, but recalculated the damages at $88.6 million.

In 2004, Pierce won on appeal at the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, setting the stage for Smith's appeal to the Supreme Court.

The case is Marshall v. Marshall , No. 04-1544.

Alito's first opinion came in Holmes v. South Carolina , No. 04-1327. Following Supreme Court tradition for new justices, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. assigned Alito a unanimous opinion as his first.

The 9 to 0 decision overturned a ruling by South Carolina's supreme court upholding a trial judge's decision to bar defense testimony implicating another person as the perpetrator, because the prosecution had "strong" physical evidence of the defendant's guilt.

That violated Bobby Lee Holmes's constitutional right to a fair trial, Alito wrote, because it allowed "little, if any, examination of the credibility of the prosecution's witnesses or the reliability of its evidence."