Supreme Court agrees to hear First Amendment case of suspended cheerleader
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether a school district can punish students for off-campus speech.
The court agreed to decide the First Amendment issue in the case of a high school cheerleader in Pennsylvania who was suspended from the junior varsity squad for repeatedly using the F-word on Snapchat.
The cheerleader, identified as “B.L.,” used the word after failing to make the varsity squad, meaning that she would remain on the junior varsity squad. The post had pictured the cheerleader and a friend holding up their middle fingers with the text, “f- - - school f- - - softball f- - - cheer f- - - everything.”
Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that may decide whether public schools have the authority to discipline students for off-campus, online speech.
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This is a slow news week in the world of domestic relations. For this lawyer only two Christmas crises and those easily resolved. Hollywood is obsessing over whether Jennifer Anniston’s holiday ornament with a Covid theme was insensitive. We know that at least 1,600 people who started the day with the ability to worry about that subject won’t have to grapple with it any longer as they will have died today from the disease.
The interesting subject for me today was at the corner of constitutional rights and adult authority. It is a case decided in Pennsylvania and headed to the Supreme Court of the United States. It ties into a subject we have written about before; that of free speech versus responsible speech in an age where the power to publish is governed only by the “send” button.
Cheerleader’s First Amendment Snapchat Case Headed for SCOTUS
28 Dec 2020
It’s been years since a teen in Pennsylvania took to Snapchat to express her frustration in vulgar terms of not making the varsity cheerleading team. After a screenshot of the post led to her suspension from the squad for one year and a successful suit by the student only identified as B.L., four years later the case is heading to the United States Supreme Court.
“F ck school, f ck softball, f ck cheer, fuck everything,” she wrote, with a photo of herself giving the middle finger.
After her parents, Lawrence and Betty Lou Levy sued the school district for the suspension the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that the action violated B.L.’s First Amendment rights by trying to regulate her speech while off-campus.