Law Commons^™

Education Is Speech: Parental Free Speech In Education, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Education is speech. This simple point is profoundly important. Yet it rarely gets attention in the First Amendment and education scholarship.

Among the implications are those for public schools. All the states require parents to educate their minor children and at the same time offer parents educational support in the form of state schooling. States thereby press parents to take government educational speech in place of their own. Under both the federal and state speech guarantees, states cannot pressure parents, either directly or through conditions, to give up their own educational speech, let alone substitute state educational speech. This abridges …

Restoring Student Press Freedoms: Why Every State Needs A 'New Voices' Law, Clare R. Norins, Taran Harmon-Walker, Navroz Tharani

Scholarly Works

Scholastic journalists across America have long provided vital reporting, commentary, and fresh perspective on issues of public concern to their readers. Never has this been more true than in the current age of dwindling print media, where scholastic journalists at both the high school and post-secondary levels are stepping in to populate what would otherwise be news deserts. Yet the Supreme Court’s decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988), allows school officials to censor both the content and style of school-sponsored media without offending the First Amendment. This essay traces the history of student speech rights …

What Once Was Lost Must Now Be Found: Rediscovering An Affirmative Action Jurisprudence Informed By The Reality Of Race In America, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

This academic year has seen college and university students across America calling on their institutions to do more to create campus cultures supportive of African American students and other underrepresented minorities. There have been demands to increase faculty and student diversity, change curricular requirements, and adopt mandatory cultural sensitivity trainings. There have been efforts to rename buildings, remove images, and abandon symbols associating schools with major historic figures who were also proponents of slavery, segregation, or other forms of racism. As in all tumultuous periods for higher education, these events have provoked useful discussions about fundamental principles and brought to …

Student Press Exceptionalism, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

Constitutional protection for student speakers is an issue that has been hotly contested for almost 50 years. Several commentators have made powerful arguments that theCourt has failed to sufficiently protect the First Amendment rights of all students. But this debate has overlooked an even more troubling reality about the current state ofexpressive protection for student — the especially harmful effect of the Court’s precedents on student journalists. Under the Court’s jurisprudence, schools may regulate with far greater breadth and ease the speech of student journalists than of their non-press classmates. Schools are essentially free to censor the student press even …

How Not To Criminalize Cyberbullying, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, Andrea Garcia

UF Law Faculty Publications

This essay provides a sustained constitutional critique of the growing body of laws criminalizing cyberbullying. These laws typically proceed by either modernizing existing harassment and stalking laws or crafting new criminal offenses. Both paths are beset with First Amendment perils, which this essay illustrates through 'case studies' of selected legislative efforts. Though sympathetic to the aims of these new laws, this essay contends that reflexive criminalization in response to tragic cyberbullying incidents has led law-makers to conflate cyberbullying as a social problem with cyberbullying as a criminal problem, creating pernicious consequences. The legislative zeal to eradicate cyberbullying potentially produces disproportionate …

The Overhyped Path From Tinker To Morse: How The Student Speech Cases Show The Limits Of Supreme Court Decisions--For The Law And For The Litigants, Scott A. Moss

Publications

Each of the Supreme Court's high school student speech cases reflected the social angst of its era. In 1965's Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, three Iowa teens broke school rules to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam War. In 1983, amidst parental and political upset about youth exposure to sexuality in the media, Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser and Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier allowed the censorship of an innuendo-filled student government speech and a school newspaper article on teen pregnancy and parental divorce. In 2007, Morse v. Frederick paralleled the rise of reality television …

Progressive Free Speech And The Uneasy Case For Campus Hate Codes, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Comment On Preliminary Report On Freedom Of Expression And Campus Harassment Codes, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

Campus harassment codes pose an unprecedented problem for the AAUP, not only because the issues of academic freedom they raise are novel, but also because the academic community is itself deeply divided over those issues. Historically, the major assaults upon academic freedom have come from outside the academy--from politicians, trustees, and donors who have sought to limit inquiry and restrict the expression of unpopular views. Ideas about academic freedom have been shaped in the course of repelling these assaults and in constructing barricades that will safeguard the freedoms to teach and to learn that are at the center of the …

Papish V. Board Of Curators Of The University Of Missouri, Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

Supreme Court Case Files

No abstract provided.

Public Support And The Sectarian University, Walter Gellhorn, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In mid-1968 we undertook to advise Fordham University concerning steps that might be appropriate to establish its eligibility for public assistance. As part of that task we tried to determine the extent to which present law requires official differentiation between Church-related and other institutions of higher learning. Since the University sought a wholly detached consideration of its legal posture, our conclusions in this article represent our best judgment of the present state of the law and its probable development. We have avoided indicating our own personal position on debatable legal and ethical issues.