Law Commons^™

Title Ix & Menstruation, Margaret E. Johnson, Emily Gold Waldman, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

“Oh no. Could I borrow a tampon or pad?” These (or similar) words are familiar to almost everyone who has ever had a period. Even for adults, menstruation can at times be a challenge. For some schoolchildren, it can be an insurmountable obstacle to receiving an education. Students are subject to constant observation by classmates and teachers; they may not have autonomous access to a bathroom during the school day; or they may not be able to afford menstrual products. They may experience menstruation-related peer harassment, restrictive school policies, a lack of access to menstrual products, and inadequate menstruation-related education. …

Walking Out: Schools, Students, And Civil Disobedience, Michelle S. Simon

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article begins in Part I by reviewing the history and impact of youth civil disobedience and the special issues school walkouts raise. Part II then discusses the legal doctrines that guide school administrators and courts as they aim to strike a suitable balance between free expression and the day-to day operations of a school. Part III analyzes the different approaches school districts have taken, and offers specific advice to school districts dealing with future walkouts. Part IV cautions that the only constitutionally permitted response by school districts is to subject students to the same consequences they would face for …

Tinkering With Success: College Athletes, Social Media And The First Amendment, Mary Margaret Meg Penrose

Pace Law Review

Good law does not always make good policy. This article seeks to provide a legal assessment, not a policy directive. The policy choices made by individual institutions and athletic departments should be guided by law, but absolutely left to institutional discretion. Many articles written on college student-athletes’ social media usage attempt to urge policy directives clothed in constitutional analysis.

In this author’s opinion, these articles have lost perspective – constitutional perspective. This article seeks primarily to provide a legal and constitutional assessment so that schools and their athletic departments will have ample information to then make their own policy choices.

Ratings Fetishism, Leslie Yalof Garfield

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The obsession with increasing the reputational rankings of American colleges and universities more detrimentally impacts race-based admissions policies than does Supreme Court doctrine. It is no secret that many schools inflate, misleadingly report, or falsify records in order to pander to rankings systems like U.S. News and World Report (“U.S. News”). These systems weigh a school’s mean standardized test scores (SAT and/or ACT) heavily as one of the factors for assigning a rank. Thus, the incentive among schools playing the ratings game is to admit students with the highest SAT scores. But, if one agrees with the data that underrepresented …

I’M The One Making The Money, Now Where’S My Cut? Revisiting The Student-Athlete As An “Employee” Under The National Labor Relations Act, John J. Leppler

Pace Intellectual Property, Sports & Entertainment Law Forum

This Article argues why the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) Big-Time Division I College Football and Men’s Basketball student-athletes are legally “employees” and why these student-athletes are inadequately compensated for their revenue-producing skills.

Part II of this Article sets forth the common law “right of control” test and the National Labor Relation Act’s (NLRA) special statutory test for students in a university setting, and shows how the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the judiciary determine whether a particular person, specifically a university student, meets these standards and is legally an “employee”. Moreover, the NCAA asserts it does not have …

No Jokes About Dope: Morse V. Frederick's Educational Rationale, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This piece begins with a “protective” reading of Morse v. Frederick, showing how this rationale provides a good starting point in understanding Morse but is ultimately incomplete. Indeed, Justice Stevens’ dissent is largely an argument that the protective rationale falls short here. I then re-examine Morse from the perspective of the educational rationale and conclude that the underlying, largely unstated premise of the Morse majority is that schools—as part of teaching students about the gravity of drug use—should be able to convey disapproval of messages suggesting that drug use is a joking or trivial matter. This helps to explain why …

Students' Fourth Amendment Rights In Schools: Strip Searches, Drug Tests, And More, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

At the end of June 2009, the Supreme Court decided Safford Unified School District No. 1 v. Redding, a case involving the strip search of a thirteen-year-old girl at an Arizona middle school. Thus, the Court has now decided four cases regarding public school students' Fourth Amendment rights while at school and the time is ripe to take stock of this jurisprudence as a whole. The following discussion provides such an overview. As an initial matter, it is useful to divide the Court's four Fourth Amendment cases into two categories: (1) cases involving suspicion-based searches of individual students, such as …

Regulating Student Speech: Suppression Versus Punishment, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article examines the Supreme Court’s student speech framework and argues that, in focusing exclusively on the types of student speech that can be restricted, the framework fails to build in any differentiation as to how such speech can be restricted. This is true even though there are two very distinct types of speech restrictions in schools: suppression of the speech itself; and after-the-fact punishment of the student speaker. As the student speech landscape itself gets more complex – given schools’ experimentation with new disciplinary regimes along with the tremendous rise in student cyber-speech – the blurring of that distinction …

Morse V. Frederick: Evaluating A Supreme Hit To Students' First Amendment Rights, Kellie A. Cairns

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.