Constitutional Law

Student Speech: Canary in the Coal Mine?

Courts are eroding students' right of free speech -- a potential harbinger of further infringements -- according to an Issue Brief just released by ACS in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of Tinker v. Des Moines.

"It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate," wrote the U.S. Supreme Court in Tinker. This long-standing principle is being tested in the digital age.

In Reaching Through the Schoolhouse Gate: Students' Eroding First Amendment Rights in a Cyber-Space World, author Frank LoMonte maintains, "Students do not enjoy -- anywhere, anytime -- the same right to comment on school events as ordinary citizens."

According to LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, digital means are increasingly delivering extracurricular student speech onto campuses and inviting regulation by school authorities. LoMonte concludes that recent precedents upholding such regulations endanger broader applications of the First Amendment.

"Once First Amendment rights are lost, they seldom are recovered because people who cannot speak cannot arouse support," LoMonte writes. "The loss is incremental, with each descending stair step becoming 'the new normal,' and so this latest incursion on young people's rights must be viewed in the larger context of decades of dangerous retrenchment."

Full post as published by ACS Blog on March 04, 2009 (boomark / email).