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screw movember, let's do nouvember. (pg. 21)
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| quote: | Originally posted by Joss Weatherby
(something drilled into me as a child by my father who won a US supreme court case limiting free speech in schools). |
Wait, your father won a case to limit speech in schools? Or in defense of speech? |
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| OrangestO |
Haha, no .
I just had an exam with a question involving this case. |
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| Joss Weatherby |
| quote: | Originally posted by OrangestO
Haha, no .
I just had an exam with a question involving this case. |
Yea as far as free speech in schools goes its pretty significant, it was the first real limitations put on the landmark Tinker v. Des Moines decision.
The attorney that presented the oral argument is a law professor at UW law school now and he went over the case when my cousin was in his class and she came up to him after and was like "umm I think you were talking about my uncle" cause he was saying things like "Ohhh I was so nervous, but not Cliff, he was just hanging out in the restaurant eating bread and talking to dignitaries from some African delegation that was in DC..." :p
My dad loves bread. |
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| srussell0018 |
| Now you can tell all your classmates that you know one of the attorneys' roommate. |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| Lameeeeeeeee. It only seems to list the School District rather than the school itself. I can see how a Private school can have the right to maintain censorship (which is precisely why they should not be granted any tax or funding pardons), but if he went a Public High School, that is a completely bull waste of time and legal proceedings. :mad: |
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| OrangestO |
| quote: | Originally posted by srussell0018
Now you can tell all your classmates that you know one of the attorneys' roommate. |
:stongue: |
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| Joss Weatherby |
| quote: | Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On
Lameeeeeeeee. It only seems to list the School District rather than the school itself. I can see how a Private school can have the right to maintain censorship (which is precisely why they should not be granted any tax or funding pardons), but if he went a Public High School, that is a completely bull waste of time and legal proceedings. :mad: |
Not really. You are a kid in school, you do not have the same free speech rights as an adult on the street, especially when that speech is being used to disrupt the education process.
See the Bong Hits for Jesus case, which cited my fathers case quite significantly. |
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| OrangestO |
1969: Tinker v. Des Moines (The Tinker Standard)
-Supreme Court rules that students in the public schools do not shed at the schoolhouse gate their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression
-Dec. 16, 1966, Christopher Eckhardt, 16, and Mary Beth Tinker, 13, went to school wearing homemade black armbands, replete with peace signs, to protest the war in Vietnam
-Students suspended; school administrators feared that wearing the armbands might provoke violence among the students, most of whom supported the war in Vietnam
-Three years later, the Supreme Court held that students have a First Amendment right to express their opinions on even controversial subjects if they do so “without materially and substantially interfering with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school and without colliding with the rights of others”
-Supreme Court added that an “undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression” in public schools
2003: Barber v. Dearborn Public Schools
-Bretton Barber, high school junior, wore a T-shirt labeling President George W. Bush an “International Terrorist” in order to “express his feelings about President Bush’s foreign policies and the imminent war in Iraq”
-Filed a federal lawsuit against the school district after being sent home for not turning the shirt inside out when asked to
-Judge Patrick J. Duggan decided that Barber’s case was not guided by the high court’s more recent decisions in either the sexually offensive, captive-audience expression of Bethel School District v. Fraser or the school-sponsored newspaper case of Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlemeir
-Barber’s situation much more similar to the Tinker case, allowing judge to distinguish the latter two cases
-Applying the Tinker precedent, Judge Duggan reasoned that the school officials’ “decision to ban Barber’s shirt only can withstand constitutional scrutiny if they show that the T-shirt caused a substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities or created more than an unsubstantiated fear or apprehension of such a disruption or interference”
-Only one student and teacher expressed negative opinions and that there was “no evidence that the T-shirt created any disturbance or disruption in barber’s morning classes, in the hallway between classes or between Barber’s third hour class and his lunch period, or during the first twenty-five minutes of the lunch period”
-Judge Duggan wrote, “Clearly the tension between students who support and those who oppose President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq is no greater than the tension that existed during the United States’ involvement in Vietnam between supporters of the war and war-protestors” Judge added that “students benefit when school officials provide an environment where they can openly express their diverging viewpoints and when they learn to tolerate the opinions of others”
1988 Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier (The Hazelwood Standard)
-Principal censored the school newspaper by completely removing two pages that contained article about teen pregnancy and the impact of parents’ divorce on children
-School officials said they were concerned that the identity of the three girls who agreed to anonymously discuss their pregnancies might become know and that they acted to protect the privacy of students and parents in the story on divorce
-Supreme Court riles that the censorship was permissible under the First Amendment
-Important to note ruling involved censorship of a high school newspaper that was published as a part of the school curriculum
-Court strongly suggested the ruling would not necessarily apply to a high school paper published as an extracurricular activity where any student might contribute stories
-Justice Byron White, author of the court’s opinion, noted specifically in a footnote that the court did not at that time have to decide whether its riling might also be applied to school-sponsored college and university newspapers
-Supreme Court refused to apply the Tinker standard, Justice White in a 5-3 decision saying it deals with the right of educators to silence a student’s personal expression that happens to occur on school property. Hazelwood concerns the authority of educators over school-sponsored publications.
-“Educators are entitled to exercise greater control over this second form of student expression to assure that participants learn whatever lessons the activity is designed to teach, that readers or listeners are not exposed to material that may be inappropriate for their level of maturity, and that the views of individual speakers are not erroneously attributed to the school”
-Educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control as long as their actions reasonably related to “legitimate pedagogical concerns” meaning schools officials could censor out material they found “ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences”
-Only when the decision to censor has “no valid educational purpose” is the First Amendment directly and sharply involved
2004: Dean v. Utica Community Schools
-American Civil Liberties Union filed lawsuit on behalf of Dean, claiming the censorship of her story for newspaper violated Dean’s First Amendment rights under Hazelwood
-U.S. District Court Judge Arthur Tarnow applied the Hazelwood legitimate-pedagogical-concerns standard and rued in favor of Dean and against the school; the judge called the school’s censorship and suppression of the article “unconstitutional,” adding that the school’s “explanation that the article was deleted for legitimate educational purposes such as bias and factual inaccuracy is wholly lacking in credibility in light of the evidence in the record”
-Distinguished it from Hazelwood case because Dean’s article about the bus-fumes lawsuit did not raise any privacy concerns since a local paper had already addressed the lawsuit, and did not contain any sexual “frank talk” and thus could not reasonably be perceived as being unsuitable for immature audiences
-Judge Tarnow ruled that the censorship of her article violated the more general but important First Amendment rule against viewpoint-based censorship
-Viewpoint-based censorship: the worst form of content-based regulation that exists when the government censors or regulates one particular viewpoint or side on a given topic or issue but does not censor or regulate another viewpoint or side on the same topic or issue
-Leonard Law: applies First Amendment standards to private, secular high schools and to secondary schools; these private schools, on other words, are forbidden from violating students’ First Amendment rights (California only state to have this law extending rights of First Amendment to private school students)
1986: Bethel School District v. Fraser
-Court held that official at Bethel High School did not violate the free speech rights of student Matthew Fraser when they suspended him for making a sexually suggestive speech nominating a classmate for student government at an assembly packed with 600 students
-In rejecting Fraser’s First Amendment argument, the majority of the Supreme Court refused to apply the Tinker substantial-and-material-disruption standard, noting what it called a “marked distinction between the political ‘message’ of the armbands in Tinker and the sexual content” of Fraser’s talk, as well as the fact that the speech in Tinker was “passive expression” (it was an armband) while Fraser’s speech was actively spoken to a captive audience of students gathered at assembly
-Court held that schools can punish students who use “offensively lewd and indecent speech” that is “unrelated to any political viewpoint” because such expression would undermine the school’s basic educational mission; it is highly appropriate function of public school education to prohibit the use of vulgar and offensive terms in public discourse; and society has an interest in teaching students the boundaries of socially appropriate behavior
Summary
Tinker: schools officials may regulate speech that they reasonably believe will materially and substantially disrupt or interfere with classwork, educational activities and/or discipline
Hazelwood: schools may regulate speech that is school sponsored and/or that is part of the school curriculum, so long as the censorship is reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns
Bethel: schools may regulate sexually offensive speech that is lewd, vulgar or indecent (they also can regulate obscene speech since it is without any First Amendment; Fraser’s language about speech that “would undermine the school’s basic educational mission” also is used successfully by some schools to ban images and ads for drugs, tobacco and alcohol
2007: Morse v. Frederick
-Known as the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case
-9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2006 that the First Amendment protected a student’s right to unfurl, while standing on a sidewalk across the street from his high school as an Olympic torch relay passed by, a banner emblazoned with that drug-related catchphrase
-Student said it was to get on television, while the school principal considered it a pro-drug message in conflict with the school’s “basic educational mission to promote a healthy, drug-free life style”
-Frederick: banner taken down and suspended for 10 days
-9th Circuit ruled for Fredrick while applying the Tinker standard; noting there was no substantial and material disruption of educational activities caused by Fredrick’s banner, the 9th Circuit focused on the fact that the school conceded the banner “was censored only because it conflicted with the school’s mission of discouraging drug use”
-School petitioned Supreme Court to reverse the 9th Circuit’s opinion; represented by Ken Starr (investigated Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky) who asked the nation’s high court to consider the following question: Whether the First Amendment allows public schools to prohibit students from displaying messages promoting the use of illegal substances at school-sponsored, faculty-supervised events
-Supreme Court ruled in 2007 holding that the First Amendment rights of Fredrick were not violated
-Chief Justice Roberts: “schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use,” “this is plainly not a case about political debate over the criminalization of drug use or possession
-The Morse opinion is limited in scope to nonpolitical speech that advocates or celebrates the use of illegal drugs
-Just six months after Morse, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals interpreted Morse to stand for a broad, pro-censorship principle – that “speech advocating a harm that is demonstrably grave and that derives that gravity from the ‘special danger’ to the physical safety of students arising from the school environment is protected”
Censoring an Editorial on the Legalization of Marijuana
-Principal at Blue Spring High School in Texas confiscated an issue of The Corral because it featured a student-written editorial calling for legalization of marijuana
-Morse v. Fredrick: speech that advocates or encourage the use of illegal drugs may be censored
-Editorial was political speech that advocated for the legalization of marijuana
-Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, “a political opinion urging a change in the law is absolutely the highest and most protected First Amendment speech”
-No censorship under Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier as long as it was not “ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences”
Student Speech Rights on the Web
-If a student who creates the off-campus, Internet-posted speech later downloads it at schools and shows it to other students while on campus, then the school has jurisdiction and the Tinker standard typically applies
-2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held in Doninger v. Niehoff, that if it is “reasonably foreseeable” that off-campus speech posted on the Internet will come to the attention of school authorities and that its posting creates “a foreseeable risk of substantial disruption to the work and discipline of the school,” then the student-author can be punished under the Tinker standard
-Doninger: student posted blog on livejournal.com calling school administrators “douchebags” and urged fellow students to write administrators to complain about a scheduling controversy over a battle-of-the-bands “Jamfest” concert
-3rd Circuit Court of Appeals: contradictory rulings
-Myspace profiles mocking and disparaging their respective principals
-Layshock: student-friendly language including the dicta that “it would be an unseemly and dangerous precedent to allow the state in the guise of school authorities to reach into a child’s home and control his or her actions there to the same extent that they can control that child when he or she participates in school sponsored activities”
-Later in 2010, Circuit Court vacated both decisions and decided to grant an en banc hearing in the two cases. When the Court rules in both cases in June 2011, its decisions did nothing to clarify the law in this area |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| quote: | Originally posted by Joss Weatherby
Not really. You are a kid in school, you do not have the same free speech rights as an adult on the street, especially when that speech is being used to disrupt the education process. |
You don't shed the rights to free speech (to which everyone is indeed entitled to as a citizen, regardless of age, you know that) when you enter the school. I realize this was an amended provision to the original case of rights to students' speech, and that "disrupting the educational process" is certainly specified as a right to action by the school authority, but without knowing the intricacies of the case, I am boggled that they could come up with conclusive evidence that the witnessing students' education was indeed disrupted by something so mere as sexual innuendo.
It's just one of those tight legal rulings that everyone knows is absolutely bull. Know what disrupts the educational process in the classroom with sexual suggestion? Coed classrooms. :stongue: |
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| OrangestO |
| It undermines the school’s basic educational mission; it is highly appropriate function of public school education to prohibit the use of vulgar and offensive terms in public discourse; and society has an interest in teaching students the boundaries of socially appropriate behavior. |
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| Joss Weatherby |
| quote: | Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On
You don't shed the rights to free speech (to which everyone is indeed entitled to as a citizen, regardless of age, you know that) when you enter the school. I realize this was an amended provision to the original case of rights to students' speech, and that "disrupting the educational process" is certainly specified as a right to action by the school authority, but without knowing the intricacies of the case, I am boggled that they could come up with conclusive evidence that the witnessing students' education was indeed disrupted by something so mere as sexual innuendo.
It's just one of those tight legal rulings that everyone knows is absolutely bull. Know what disrupts the educational process in the classroom with sexual suggestion? Coed classrooms. :stongue: |
Actually there was another case my dad was involved in that limited the content of a school newspaper for publishing sexually suggestive articles.
You are entitled to free speech, but not with out consequence when it is disruptive to a process like education, the same as being punished for yelling fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire. In certain situations your free speech can not be used to disrupt others.
There is nothing in the constitution that says you can not be punished for saying or doing stupid things. For example libel and slander, you have the right to publish those things, but it doesn't mean you can't be punished for it. These are all pretty clear cut cases.
The Tinker case is a good example of allowing free speech, students were protesting in a way that didn't bother other students or disrupt the process of learning. Standing up at an assembly and talking about how good another student is at ing is not the same thing. |
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