Brother Jim will not have his day in court. The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear the case of the evangelical preacher, James G. Gilles, who calls himself Brother Jim and whose speech Vincennes University restricted to a small part of its campus in 2002.

Officials at Vincennes, a public institution in Indiana, had found the preacher on the campus and told him he needed to file paperwork to engage in “solicitation” there. The permit the university granted limited Mr. Gilles to a walkway in front of the student union. He sued in 2004 and lost. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the lower court’s ruling that the university could legally limit Mr. Gilles’s speech to a certain location.

The Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative, Christian legal-advocacy group, appealed to the Supreme Court on Mr. Gilles’s behalf, arguing that he should be able to preach where Vincennes told him he couldn’t: the library lawn, an area the group called “an open and accessible part of the campus resembling a sidewalk and public park.” But no luck for Brother Jim: The appellate court’s decision will stand.

Mr. Gilles has had mixed luck in court. He sued Murray State University last year for keeping him off its campus, and he lost. But his Web site says he has won “dozens of court battles” and “legally opened” more than 50 campuses. —Sara Lipka