The Supreme Court: RIP Literally Everything

Honestly this school opinion is a perfect example of why the Supreme Court is often infuriating. It is in our esteemed opinion that the line where schools can punish students for off campus speech is somewhere between fuck cheer and directly threatening the principal. We will be happy to make that line a little bit clearer in 10 years when we take the topic up again :man_shrugging:.

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I don’t really see the relevance of “outside of school” versus posting something publicly on the internet from afar. Feels like olds trying to do dumb shit with technology.

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Who cares?

outside of school means that teachers can tell kids to shut up if they are disrupting classes for other kids. outside of that teaching function, that particular teacher’s privilege is no longer constitutional.

The opinion is far more complex than that and possibly much broader than you’re suggesting. However, my point is that they repeatedly tag this logic like it really matters a lot citing in loco parentis:

the Mahanoy Area High School violated B. L.’s First Amendment rights when it punished her for the messages she posted on her own time while away from school premises;

She sent the messages and image in question on her own time while at a local convenience store.

This is suspect and reduces to figuring out the exact boundary conditions for “on her own time” and the allowable geographical locations of speech transmission (and probably reception too but they are too dense to realize that because everyone on the court is either unqualified or 80 fucking years old). If school starts at 8 AM and she submits at 7:59:59 from one meter outside of school property lines and disrupts normal school activity then she’s good to go? The opinion points out that “inside of school” may be broad enough to include activities such as travel to and from school. My point is that answering these questions is a waste of time that makes no material difference to anything. It’s preposterous territory to venture into given modern electronic communication methods, and yet a substantial piece of the concurring logic is based on actual spoken word that occurs on physical school premises.

“Disrupts school activity” seems like the easy bright line to me. Where it happens is less important. If she’s legitimately harassing or threatening people then it certainly doesn’t matter when or where she’s posting from.

On the other hand, I have a really hard time seeing how venting with a “fuck cheerleading” post is actually disrupting school activity in the year 2021.

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Right. If you read the examples, they are all about disruption. Spatiotemporal location only seems relevant because it’s inseparable from the (limited) examples of physical human speech performed on location, e.g., delivering a political diatribe during calculus class. Threats and harassment automatically meet the threshold of unprotected speech, so I’m only talking about speech that doesn’t rise to that level. If you squint really hard and try to envision, say, some Tweets that are legitimately disruptive but don’t meet the threshold for harassment, then it’s not hard to see that the time and location tests are a laugh track.

It’s not, and the school even said as much. There’s nothing even remotely noteworthy about it in 2021, yet the repeated pearl-clutching in this opinion about unsavory language was pretty difficult to plow through. I mean, it’s not like the girl broadcast it over the school intercom or spelled it out on the auditorium letter board–it was a private message sent to Snapchat contacts. Oh noes oUr cHiLdReN aRe SaYiNg ThE “F” wOrD.

3 decisions today. Anything with bigger consequences?

This is unrelated to the matter at hand, but I’d assume that a teacher can tell a kid to shut up in school or out of school. The only difference is that out of school, there is no expectation that student should comply and there should be no punishment for non-compliance. If there is a threat of punishment based on non-compliance, then that would be wrong. I guess one could argue that threat is always implied, but the teacher does have free speech rights too.

I haven’t read the decision, but was it clear how they would have ruled if she posted “Fuck Coach Smith” (assume Coach Smith is the cheerleading coach) instead of “Fuck Cheerleading”?

i meant that it’s not really about technology making old boundaries of inside/outside of school obsolete, but rather about whether student is disrupting school activity by attracting too much attention to themselves or bullying a teacher and other students to the point they can’t lead class or something in that vein. like someone who was rejected in tryouts cannot go around trying to shut down team participation.

i do think the suspension was bullshit, and students are entitled to say ‘fuck school’ in this situation, since they have no other power. would be different if there were enough students to cancel cheer over social media or something. it’s not a narrow case, but there have been far narrower scotus decisions that went the wrong way

On Friday, the Supreme Court pulled off a heist decades in the making. In TransUnion v. Ramirez , five conservative justices seized Congress’ power to create new individual rights and protect victims by authorizing lawsuits when those rights are violated. Instead, the court awarded itself the power to decide which rights may be vindicated in federal court, overturning Congress’ own decisions about which harms deserve redress. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion for the court was so extreme it prompted Justice Clarence Thomas to write a furious dissent, joined by the liberals, that accused the majority of infidelity to the Constitution. But because of the court’s 6–3 conservative supermajority, Thomas’ defection from the conservative bloc did not change the outcome. And now, thanks to Friday’s decision, a huge number of Americans harmed by a flagrant violation of the law will be locked out of the federal judiciary altogether.

The most important (as in effective) prohibitions of speech will always be things that protect the rich and the state.

I’m working from memory but I don’t think it was clear.

For example, in Ontario it’s illegal to stand on public property outside a slaughterhouse to bear witness to the suffering of animals in transport, and document the condition of animals in transport trucks.

eta: I now realize I am responding to something from last November here, but I clicked on this thread by accident and that’s where I landed.

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Related anecdote: When I was a freshman, the artist for the shirts we wore to an annual convention slid a “FUCK [the acting principal’s name]” past the shirt cops and onto the final shirt. Play stood as called. In one of the following years, I designed a completely innocuous shirt that was banned for being too gay.

well I found it interesting nonetheless.

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The recent 5-4 episode on the Fulton vs. Philadelphia case is exceptional. (The case where Philadelphia wanted to terminate its contract with a religious foster care agency because they discriminated against same-sex couples.)

Also, this is not a story I expected to wake up to:

The Supreme Court on Monday left in place a decision that allowed a transgender student to use the bathroom that corresponded to his gender identity, a victory for the LGBTQ community that has been fearful the high court would take up the case and reverse a lower court opinion.

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But what if that was at a private church school?

You want to get paid to do a service for the government you should be bound be the non discrimination laws.

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Seems like they didn’t take it up based on Title IX. While the NCAA ruling didn’t really have anything to do with that, I wonder if this indicates they are willing to uphold Title IX when someone inevitably sues a university for defunding womens’ sports disproportionate to mens’.