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The state of Alaska has spent the past 14 years trying to confiscate an 82-year-old bush pilot’s $95,000 airplane because a passenger packed a six-pack of Budweiser with her groceries.

That sentence is not a simplification. It is the whole case. And last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear it, which means the justices will finally have to answer a question they have been dodging for decades: Does the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines actually stop the government from taking anything?

It began on April 3, 2012, an ordinary morning for Ken Jouppi, who had spent decades flying people, mail, and groceries across the Alaskan interior. He was scheduled to carry a passenger from Fairbanks to Beaver, a predominantly Alaska Native village of fewer than 100 people about 110 miles north of the city, reachable only by air or river. Packed among the passenger’s supplies were three cases of beer, a gift for her husband, Beaver’s postmaster. The village had voted itself dry in 2004, as Alaska’s local option law lets rural communities do; the beer was contraband. State troopers searched the plane before takeoff and found the beer. Jouppi swore he had no idea; bush pilots do not rummage through their passengers’ bags. A jury convicted him of a misdemeanor anyway, on the theory that a single six-pack sat in plain view, and a judge gave him the statutory minimum: a $1,500 fine and three days in jail.

That should have been the end of it. Instead, Alaska went after the plane, a 1969 Cessna that was the entire working capital of Jouppi’s one-man air-taxi service. The forfeiture fight outlasted his flying career, and last year it produced the ruling the Supreme Court will now review. Alcohol abuse devastates rural Alaska, the state’s highest court reasoned, fueling crime, disease, and death, and against that backdrop, the illegal importation of even a six-pack of beer causes “grave societal harm.” Weighed against harm that grave, an airplane is apparently a bargain.

To understand how a court talks itself into that, you have to appreciate how little law there is to stop it. The excessive-fines clause is the neglected middle child of the Eighth........

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