When students post on social media from off of school property, are those posts protected as free speech? The US Supreme Court will issue a ruling that decides that question before adjourning for the summer.
When Brandi Levy, a junior varsity cheerleader at a Pennsylvania high school, learned that she didn’t make the varsity cheerleading team, she did what any teenager might she blew off some steam on social media. On a Saturday, from a neighborhood convenience store, she posted a short, profanity-laced rant on Snapchat expressing her discontent with school and cheerleading, with an image of herself and a friend raising their middle fingers to the camera.
Can a public university discipline a professor for refusing to address a student by the student’s preferred pronoun? If so, can the professor defend his conduct by alleging his.
In February, members of the East Tennessee State University (ETSU) basketball team locked arms and took a knee in what Coach Jason Shay called a symbolic protest against “racial inequalities
Monday, May 10, 2021
The Supreme Court of the United States will hear argument in
Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. and whatever the result, the decision will fundamentally change how a public school can discipline students for speech that occurs outside the school.
Traditionally, public school officials were allowed to punish students for exercising their First Amendment rights on school grounds when the speech ‘would materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline and in the operation of the school.’ This rule, first articulated in
The facts of
Mahanoy involve a high school freshman and junior varsity cheerleader, B.L., who went on to Snapchat to voice her frustration about not making the varsity cheerleading team. After posting a picture of her and friend, with middle fingers raised and a caption ‘‘F school, f softball, f cheer, f everything,’ she was suspended from the cheerleading team. Importan