This continued the justice argument that has underpinned some of the coalition's previous reforms: the idea that welfare claimants should not enjoy lifestyles, or be able to live in places, that ordinary working people cannot afford.
Many veteran attorneys will say it is hard to sway a justice at argument to your side, but it's easy to cede your core position with a weak presentation.
And it would give the Justice Department yet another argument for dismantling the Windows monopoly.
The Department of Justice first tackled the argument that PASPA violates the anti-commandeering principles of the Tenth Amendment.
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The bigger potential flaw with Chief Justice Roberts's argument is not with the statistics he cites but with the conclusion he draws from them.
Justice Antonin Scalia rejected that argument, saying if a tail for one day by human officers is legal, then why not a tail by GPS for 100 days?
Chief Justice Roberts raised the popular argument that the government already assesses cigarette taxes as a financial disincentive to smoking, and he likened that to a tax incentive to purchase health insurance.
The government's lead counsel got exactly 201 words into his argument when the first Justice cut in, asking for a citation.
Mr Justice Ouseley ruled "untenable" the argument that the inspection policy had been changed to evade the effective inspection of animals in transit.
Justice Clarence Thomas has not spoken at argument in more than six years, preferring to let the lawyers plead their case without much interruption.
Poland's junior justice minister, Andrzej Duda, reopened the argument at a working lunch.
Carrie Severino, chief counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network and a former law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, rejected Obama's argument that support for his health care legislation was a moral choice.
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"The defendant was untruthful with many falsehoods and lies, " Justice Department prosecutor Alan Gershel said in his closing argument.
During the oral argument, the key "swing" Justice, Anthony Kennedy, indicated that he would only vote to uphold the individual mandate if he could find a logical stopping point to the government's argument.
In an article this week in the Hill newspaper, a reporter put to an official in the Obama administration the argument that the IRS scandal and the Justice Department's penetrations of the Associated Press and Fox News suggest the federal government has too much power.
Today, pretty much everyone was shocked about how well that argument worked, drawing the conservative Chief Justice over to the side of the liberals and leaving the usual swing vote of Anthony Kennedy at the side of the road writing a dissent with the minority.
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The chief justice, after rejecting the administration's Commerce clause argument, turned to the more general power of Congress to tax.
That division was clear from the oral arguments: Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy asked tough questions of both sides at argument.
Chief Justice John Roberts didn't seem to buy that argument.
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Yet before long it is hard to feel much sympathy for anybody involved save the judge, Mr Justice Bell, refereeing two mind-numbing years of argument about rain forests, litter, the cooking temperature of hamburgers, exploited hamburger flippers and so forth.
When I made that comparison yesterday, however, readers left some compelling comments for and against, so I want to revisit the argument from a reader standpoint and to do those justice we need to pull Google into the same ring.
The swing vote belonged to Justice Thomas who, as is his custom, said nothing at argument and thus gave no clue to his leanings.
But David Harbach of the U.S. Justice Department's public integrity section told jurors in a rebuttal argument that Lowell was merely trying to distract jurors from focusing on the charges against Edwards.
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His target was fairly obviously Sinn Fein, but whilst Martin McGuinness replied only tangentially - pointing out that all the other major parties in the Republic had welcomed the Hillsborough deal on justice - it was Peter Robinson who took the SDLP's argument about democratic legitimacy head on.
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The publishers' argument that agency pricing increased competition hasn't persuaded the Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
Chief Justice Roberts, a conservative, flipped that very point around later in the argument.
The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals.
But the Justice Department, in a brief supporting the plaintiffs, makes the lawyerly argument that Geier applies only to the facts in that case.
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Justice Antonin Scalia intervened at this point to suggest that the detainees are making an unprecedented argument.
The argument is that criminals of Ta Mok's stature must be brought to justice, punished and permanently denied any role in Cambodian public life.
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