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Sanctionable Conduct: How The Supreme Court Stealthily Opened The Schoolhouse Gate, Sonja R. West Apr 2008

Sanctionable Conduct: How The Supreme Court Stealthily Opened The Schoolhouse Gate, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court's decision in Morse v. Frederick signaled that public school authority over student expression extends beyond the schoolhouse gate. This authority may extend to any activity in which a student participates that the school has officially sanctioned. The author argues that this decision is unsupported by precedent, and could encourage schools to sanction more events in the future. Because the Court failed to limit or define the power of a school to sanction an activity, the decision could have a chilling effect on even protected student expression. The author commends the Court for taking up this issue after …


Returning To Hazelwood's Core: A New Approach To Restrictions On School-Sponsored Speech, Emily Gold Waldman Jan 2008

Returning To Hazelwood's Core: A New Approach To Restrictions On School-Sponsored Speech, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The Article begins by discussing the Hazelwood decision in depth. It then discusses the various contexts in which courts have applied Hazelwood and the circuit split that has developed over how broadly Hazelwood should reach. Next, it describes the circuit split over whether Hazelwood permits viewpoint-based speech restrictions, highlighting the different speech contexts in which the circuits have reached divergent conclusions. The Article then argues that the overextension of Hazelwood links the two splits. This Part also discusses why Hazelwood is uniquely suited to the student speech context and why other doctrines-namely, the Pickering-Connick framework for teachers' classroom speech and …


Can There Really Be "Free Speech" In Public Schools?, Richard W. Garnett Jan 2008

Can There Really Be "Free Speech" In Public Schools?, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court's decision in Morse v. Frederick leaves unresolved many interesting and difficult problems about the authority of public-school officials to regulate public-school students' speech. Perhaps the most intriguing question posed by the litigation, decision, and opinions in More is one that the various Justices who wrote in the case never squarely addressed: What is the "basic education mission" of public schools, and what are the implications of this "mission" for officials' authority and students' free-speech rights. Given what we have come to think the Free Speech clause means, and considering the values it is thought to enshrine and …


A Post-Morse Framework For Students' Potentially Hurtful Speech (Religious And Otherwise), Emily Gold Waldman Jan 2008

A Post-Morse Framework For Students' Potentially Hurtful Speech (Religious And Otherwise), Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In this Article, I weave together strands from Tinker, Fraser, and Morse, as well as from lower court decisions taking varying approaches to this issue, to propose a new standard for student speech that is potentially hurtful to other students. This approach encompasses, without being limited to, speech that is religiously-motivated in nature. I argue that student speech that is hurtful to other students (whether religiously-motivated or not) should first be divided into two categories: (1) speech that identifies particular students for attack; and (2) speech, such as the message on Harper's T-shirt, that expresses a general opinion without being …