U S Supreme Court ponders cheerleader s profanity in free speech flap | WKZO | Everything Kalamazoo wkzo.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wkzo.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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(Reuters) - A Pennsylvania teenager whose profanity-laced outburst on social media got her banished from her high school’s cheerleading squad is in the spotlight at the U.S. Supreme Court this week, arguing “I shouldn’t have to be afraid to express myself.”
Brandi Levy, a former cheerleader at Mahanoy Area High School in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania and a key figure in a major U.S. case about free speech, poses in an undated photograph provided by the American Civil Liberties Union. Danna Singer/Handout via REUTERS
Brandi Levy, who made her Snapchat post away from school and on a weekend, is at the center of a major case testing the limits of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. The nine justices on Wednesday are set to hear arguments in the Mahanoy Area School District’s appeal of a lower court ruling in favor of Levy that found that the First Amendment bars public school officials from regulating off-campus speech.
April 26, 2021 | 1:02 PM
WASHINGTON – The high school cheerleader relegated to the JV squad for another year responded with a fleeting fit of frustration: a photo of her upraised middle finger and another word that begins with F.
“F school, f softball, f cheer, f everything,” 14-year-old Brandi Levy typed into Snapchat one spring Saturday. Like all “snaps” posted to a Snapchat “story,” this one, sent to about 250 “friends,” was to disappear within 24 hours, before everyone returned to Pennsylvania’s Mahanoy Area High School on Monday.
Instead, an adolescent outburst and the adult reaction to it has arrived at the Supreme Court, where it could determine how the First Amendment’s protection of free speech applies to the off-campus activities of the nation’s 50 million public school students.
By Syndicated Content
By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) â A Pennsylvania teenager whose profanity-laced outburst on social media got her banished from her high schoolâs cheerleading squad is in the spotlight at the U.S. Supreme Court this week, arguing âI shouldnât have to be afraid to express myself.â
Brandi Levy, who made her Snapchat post away from school and on a weekend, is at the center of a major case testing the limits of the U.S. Constitutionâs First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. The nine justices on Wednesday are set to hear arguments in the Mahanoy Area School Districtâs appeal of a lower court ruling in favor of Levy that found that the First Amendment bars public school officials from regulating off-campus speech.