Almost half a century ago, in a case involving students who wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court proclaimed schoolchildren don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” This
Almost half a century ago, in a case involving students who wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court proclaimed schoolchildren don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” This week, the court declined to hear a case from California that would have offered an opportunity to reaffirm that principle.
In 2010, some students at Live Oak High School near San Jose wore shirts with the American flag to school on Cinco de Mayo. An assistant principal was told by a student that “there might be problems” as a result. …
At the direction of the principal, the students were told to either turn their shirts inside out or take them off. Two students who refused were told to go home. …
The students who wore the flag shirts sued the school district, claiming their 1st and 14th Amendment rights were violated. But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their claim …
As lawyers for the students pointed out in a petition to the Supreme Court, the officials’ actions were a response not to a clear threat of disruption but rather to “unrealized and unarticulated student unrest.” What’s more, the officials gave a “heckler’s veto” to students who might have been offended by the American flag shirts.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to consider these arguments is another sign that it’s ambivalent about the principle of student free speech it enshrined in 1969 but has whittled away at in subsequent rulings.
In a concurring opinion in one of those cases, Justice Clarence Thomas complained that “we continue to distance ourselves from (the 1969 case), but we neither overrule it nor offer an explanation of when it operates and when it does not. I am afraid that our jurisprudence now says that students have a right to speak in schools except when they don’t.”
Although we think the court should have taken this case, we agree with Thomas that school administrators everywhere are entitled to clarity from the court about what the 1st Amendment requires inside the schoolhouse gate.
— Los Angeles Times
