Seventh Grader Sues School Over Right to Wear Pro-Life T-Shirt

I bring this article to your attention for a few reasons...

1. Do you think this case has legs to make it to the Supreme Court?

2. What do you think of a mother using her child as a soundboard in a public school (this incident took place at a small K-8 school)?

3. Do you think the ACLU will get involved here?

4. The details of this case as reported by FOX News come from only the mother of this child and the extremely biased article shows this.

5. The Assistant Principal mentioned in this case is one of my best friends and though repeatedly contacted for comment by FOX, he has wisely had no comment.

I doubt it.

Schools are able to restrict the rights of students if they are disrupting the learning environment by exercizing them.

1. Prolly not
2. LDO obv people only sue schools because their parents are raging cause heads.
3. I doubt it, but they really should. On the side of the kid imo.
4. Yeah
5. Sweet ride, I am sure it's fun to think about how career shattering this could be if it plays out bad for him.

Is this a serious discussion?

Student has a right to wear the shirt...pro-life, pro-choice, whatever.

I had to turn my Rob Zombie shirt inside out because it said 'Living Dead Girl' and had a chick in a bikini on it

Not in a school.

BTW gotta love the legal statement:

Okay that's cool, clearly he isn't wording it purposefully to make an issue out of this.

yep this could go to SCOTUS. It's hard to say because the girl wasn't really punished (as far as I read, anyways) like in other cases (Tinker, for example).

Obviously she was punished due to the "vice-like grip" of the Principal as she was escorted to my buddies office!

How is a shirt disruptive, and how many pro-choice or pro-Obama shirts have likewise been found disruptive?

like if her classes are now constantly interrupted by arguments revolving around her shirt. rite??

The shirt has the word "ABORTION" in big capital letters and some pictures of fetuses in various stages of development. Not the most objectionable shirt to be honest, but not at all conducive to a K-8 environment... little kids can ask too many questions parents might not want their kids to be asking at those ages.

It's pretty arbitrary and up to the school.

I don't know about the pro-choice and pro-Obama shirts. I honestly don't care all that much. To me this is just another type of argument where I can't help but go "meh" because it's an inevitable result of the government effectively controlling eduction.

Right. If you can't picture how a shirt might be disruptive, picture a kid wearing a shirt with horse porn on it to school.

This isn't some open and shut case. There are two competing interests:

1) the girl's right to express herself
2) the school's interest in not having outerwear cause a disruption

SCOTUS has ruled over and over that student's first amendment rights aren't nearly as robust in schools as they are out of them. Which doesn't mean they'd rule against the girl in this case. The precedent since Tinker is that students have a right to political speech, but it's subject to disruption -- that the speech not be disruptive, or else the school can censor it.

Since Tinker, cases like this have hinged on the disruptive nature of the expression. It's complicated, because in Tinker, the majority ruled that schools have to prove a disruption happened or is imminent, and they can't just censor speech based upon an urgent wish to avoid the controversy. That is, it's NOT enough for a school to just say "this shirt will cause a controversy" -- you have to prove that controversy disrupts the learning environment.

In this case, I think this is where the school might lose -- the shirt would almost certainly cause a controversy, but you could easily argue that controversy might not be disruptive; if it leads to a spirited debate, or whatever, it could be considered beneficial to the mission of the school, not detrimental.

this case (if it goes to SCOTUS) will prob come down to Justice Kennedy imo.

I don't think the ACLU is going to help the school on this one. I think the chances of them getting involved is fairly high, even though this case is a dog.

This is pretty much exactly right. The shirt is pretty innocuous and will likely fail to meet the disruptive criteria Dvaut mentioned. If the girl wore a T shirt w/a gruesome late term abortion pic in lieu of a developing fetus then the school probably has a case to prove disruption, as it stands now, probably not.

Doubt it. Ginsburg and Stevens both sided with the students in Morse v Frederick (aka Bong Hits 4 Jesus), and wrote an acerbic dissent to Roberts majority opinion that held in favor of the school where they essentially accused Roberts of taking a dump on the First Amendment. They'd have no leg to stand on if they sided with the school here; they'd essentially claim 1st Amendment Rights were paramount in Morse but were secondary to disruption concerns in this case. Not tenable.

Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Kennedy seemed most bothered by the fact that, in Morse, BongHits4Jesus served as a promotion of illicit and illegal drug use and was therefore not protected speech for students. A student advocating for pro-life probably has a much better chance of winning these guys over than the Bong Hit 4 Jesus kids.

Thomas was the only one who wrote that students almost categorically do not have free speech rights.

Thomas will chew on sunflower seeds during the hearing and then write a footnote lambasting the mother for not printing up a dead-fetus shirt.

Are you saying you're expecting a 8-1 decision?

IMO it'll definitely be 5-4, with the obvious people in the obvious places, and Kennedy I'm expecting to side with the liberal wing, though going the other way is definitely not out of the question.

Actually, given the subject matter, we may end up with something more like Gonzales v. Raich and the conservative wing sides with the pro-lifers.

This case is nothing like Morse vs. Fredrick. The major issue there was whether the speech took place at school or not and whether the student could be punished for it. This is about what level of speech is considered disruptive enough to where you are forced to stop but without any other punishment.

People at my junior high were constantly forced to wear pretty normal shirts inside out, like anything deemed satanic including some Marilyn Manson shirts. Granted this was right after columbine so many people went way overboard.

Not necessarily.

I'm saying that this:

...is premature.

For one, we don't know much about the case outside of the article.

Assuming the facts reported in the article are reasonably close to the reality of what happened and what would be testified on before SCOUTS:

We have a very similar case surrounding roughly the same Constitutional terrain from the recent past. So Morse v Frederick is a good guide about what to expect here.

Ginsberg and Stevens wrote that they see student's first amendment rights as almost sacrosanct in Morse and I'd expect them to do the same here. Souter ruled with them, but lets assume he's gone when this comes around. So I'd expect at least those two to rule with the girl.

Breyer both consented and dissented in Morse, and made some technical ruling that didn't have anything to do with the facts of the case -- he wanted to grant that the principal in Morse had qualified immunity for some such reason. I'm calling him a wild card. Same with Sotomayor; we just don't know enough about he would rule.

Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Kennedy seemed especially concerned that "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" was advocacy for illegal drug use, so they sided with the school district. Alito and Kennedy, in particular, make it clear that "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" wasn't protected because it advocated illegal behavior. That t-shirt is miles away from advocating anything illegal, so it's reasonable to assert at least Alito and Kennedy would side with the girl:

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/06-278.pdf

Thomas seems especially beholden to the notion that schools can censor whatever they want.

So I see it as:

2 definitely with the girl:
Ginsburg, Stevens

2 wild cards:
Breyer, Sotomayor

4 who could go either way but are better than 50/50 to side with the girl given what they wrote in Morse and the differences in the cases:
Scalia, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy

1 who seems inclined to rule with the school:
Thomas

If Scalia and the rest of the conservative wing of the court seem inclined to rule with the girl, I can see Thomas making it unanimous.

Coincidentally, I've been studying just this stuff for the past hour. I'll recap the law for my own memory and to help the discussion for you guys.

The general rule is that government regulation of speech in a nonpublic forum (e.g. a school) is valid if the regulation is (1) viewpoint neutral and (2) reasonably related to a legitimate government purpose .

My five-second, amateur, simplistic analysis is this. Viewpoint neutrality here is sticky, what with the politically charged content, but it's probably fine unless the school allows (or would allow) similar shirts worn by pro-choicers. And not allowing shirts with ABORTION is reasonably related to legit pedagogical concerns of distractions in the classroom. Tinker is somewhat inapposite because the prohibitions on the arm bands were supposedly put in place to suppress certain communication (anti-Vietnam War sentiment)--it wasn't to stop disruption. And the Bong Hits case had deterrence of drug use tied into it.

But then again, the Court usually looks at "core political speech" with a more protective eye (for instance, the Court would probably look at this shirt differently from the "Mean People Suck" shirt that my middle school made me change). I could also easily see a majority of the court analogizing this to your typical political tshirt and saying the school was in the wrong.

This isn't true at all. Read the ruling, please:

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/06-278.pdf

Notice how many times Roberts references whether or not this is a First Amendment violation. Read the dissents; read the concurring opinions. All center around the First Amendment question at hand, not the practical concerns about whether or not this was considered school speech and what the appropriate punishment was.