1st Amendment Guidebooks are due at the end of the week!
Class began with a group jigsaw of the six supreme court cases listed below. These may be of great use to the 1st Amendment Guidebook project!
Next students watched and took (Cornell) notes on trials and juries. The guiding question for the note taking is:
1) Who is being protected from what by our justice system?
2) Does our justice system value individual liberty or community safety more?
Court Cases
Tinker v.
Des Moines (1969)
Class began with a group jigsaw of the six supreme court cases listed below. These may be of great use to the 1st Amendment Guidebook project!
Next students watched and took (Cornell) notes on trials and juries. The guiding question for the note taking is:
1) Who is being protected from what by our justice system?
2) Does our justice system value individual liberty or community safety more?
Court Cases
10 Supreme Court Cases Every Teen Should Know by Tom Jacobs
NYTimes
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District (1969)
Issue: Freedom of Speech at School
Bottom Line: You Have the Right To Express
Yourself—Up to a Point
Background
In December 1965, John and Mary Beth Tinker and their friend
Chris Eckhardt wore black armbands to school in Des Moines, Iowa, to protest
the war in Vietnam. School officials told them to remove the armbands, and when
they refused, they were suspended (John, 15, from North High; Mary Beth, 13,
from Warren Harding Junior High; and Chris, 16, from Roosevelt High). With
their parents, they sued the school district, claiming a violation of their
First Amendment right of freedom of speech.
Ruling
The Supreme Court sided with the students. Students and
teachers don't "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or
expression at the schoolhouse gate," the Court said.
The Court did not, however, grant students an unlimited right
to self-expression. It said First Amendment guarantees must be balanced against
a school's need to keep order: As long as an act of expression doesn't disrupt
classwork or school activities or invade the rights of others, it's acceptable.
Regarding the students in this case, "their deviation consisted only in
wearing on their sleeve a band of black cloth," the Court said. "They
caused discussion outside of the classrooms, but no interference with work and
no disorder."
Impact
In 1986, applying the "disruption test" from the
Tinker case, the Supreme Court upheld the suspension of Matthew Fraser, a
17-year-old senior at Bethel High School in Tacoma, Washington, who gave a
school speech containing sexual innuendos (Bethel School District v. Fraser).
The Court said "it is a highly appropriate function of public school
education to prohibit the use of vulgar and offensive terms in public
discourse."
Lower courts have relied on Tinker in rulings on school
attire, allowing nose rings and dyed hair, for example, but disallowing a
T-shirt displaying a Confederate flag.
In June, the Supreme Court weighed in on another student
expression case, Frederick v. Morse, ruling that schools can limit student
speech that seems to advocate illegal drug use. The case concerned Joseph
Frederick, an 18-year-old senior at Juneau-Douglas High School in Alaska, who
was suspended in 2002 for holding a banner that said "Bong Hits 4
Jesus" while standing across the street from the school during the Olympic
torch relay.
10 Supreme Court Cases Every Teen Should Know by Tom Jacobs
NYTimes
Texas v. Johnson (1989)
Summary
This
Landmark Supreme Court Cases focuses on a case involving expressive conduct, and what is for many a deeply cherished symbol
of America—the U.S. flag. In a closely divided (5-4) ruling, the Supreme Court
held that states could not forbid burning the U.S. flag in protest, because
doing so would violate the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.
In
1984, the Republican Party convened in Dallas, Texas for their national
convention. President Ronald Regan, seeking a second term in office, was to be
officially delegated as the GOP candidate for President. Scores of individuals
organized a political protest in Dallas that voiced opposition to Reagan
administration policies and those of some Dallas-based corporations—among the
protesters was a man by the name of Gregory Lee Johnson. As the demonstrators
marched through the streets, chanting their message, a fellow protestor handed
Johnson an American flag that had been taken from a flag pole at one of their
protest locations.
Upon
reaching the Dallas City Hall, Johnson doused the flag with kerosene and set it
ablaze. Johnson and his fellow demonstrators circled the burning flag and
shouted “America, the red, white, and blue, we spit on you.” No one was hurt or
threatened with injury by the act, but many who witnessed it were deeply
offended. Johnson was arrested, charged, and convicted of violating a Texas law
that made it a crime to desecrate a “venerable object.” Texas was not the only
state to have anti-flag burning laws on the books, 47 other states also
criminalized flag desecration. For his crime, Johnson received a sentence of
one year in prison and was ordered to pay a $2,000 fine.
Johnson
appealed his conviction and his case eventually went to the Supreme Court.
Johnson argued that the Texas flag desecration statute violated the First
Amendment, which says “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of
speech … or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the
government for a redress of grievances.” The state of Texas argued that it had
an interest in preserving the flag as a symbol of national unity. The Court had
to consider: Are there certain symbols that are so widely cherished and
understood to convey certain meanings that the government can regulate their
use?
The
Court agreed with Johnson (5-4) and struck down the Texas statute. Burning a
U.S. flag in protest was expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.
“The First Amendment literally forbids the abridgment only of ‘speech,’ but we
have long recognized that its protection does not end at the spoken or written
word…. If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is
that the government may not
prohibit
the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself
offensive or disagreeable.…”
Though
Texas v. Johnson has been upheld in subsequent Supreme Court cases, flag
desecration itself remains unpopular in America. The House of Representatives
has, on six different occasions, voted on a Constitutional Amendment known as
the Flag Desecration Amendment, which states: “The Congress shall have power to
prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.” Each time
this Amendment has been introduced, it has passed the House by the required
two-thirds majority. The Amendment never passed the Senate with the 67 votes
needed, but it also has never received less than 63 votes in support.
1. In his dissenting opinion, Chief Justice
Rhenquist argued that Johnson’s right to express his views had not been
abridged. “It was Johnson’s use of this particular symbol, and not the idea
that he sought to convey by it or by his many other expressions, for which he
was punished....Surely one of the high purposes of a democratic society is to
legislate against conduct that is regarded as evil and profoundly offensive to
the majority of people—whether it be murder, embezzlement, pollution, or flag
burning.” How would you respond to this argument?
2. Consider this: Before Johnson, 48
states had anti-flag desecration laws. Each time Congress has voted on the Flag
Desecration Amendment, the proposal has passed by wide margins in the House and
just short of the required two-thirds majority in the Senate. Do you think it
is plausible that such an Amendment could become part of the Constitution? How
would this impact the Supreme Court? Would such an Amendment alter the
integrity of the First Amendment?
10 Supreme Court Cases Every Teen Should Know by Tom Jacobs
NYTimes
Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982)
Summary
In the Supreme Court case Island Trees School District v.
Pico (1982), the Court held that the First Amendment limits the power of
junior high and high school officials to remove books from school libraries
because of their content.
In the fall of 1975, a New York school board received a
complaint from a community group, Parents of New York United. The complaint
asserted that school policies on library books were too “permissive.”
Specifically, the parent group complained about nine books, including Kurt
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Langston Hughes’s Best Short Stories of
Negro Writers. The group said the books were “anti-American, anti-Christian,
anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.” In response, the school district removed
the books in February of 1976.
Senior Steven Pico joined with four other students to challenge
the school board’s decision to remove the books. Pico claimed that the books
were removed because “passages in the books offended [the group’s] social,
political, and moral tastes and not because the books, taken as a whole, were
lacking in educational value.” A dozen library and free speech organizations
filed briefs on the students’ behalf. The case went to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court ruled in the students’ favor on First
Amendment grounds, holding that the right to read is implied by the First
Amendment. The government—in this case, a public school—cannot restrict speech
because it does not agree with the content of that speech. The decisions called
libraries places for “voluntary inquiry” and concluded that the school board’s
“absolute discretion” over the classroom did not extend to the library for that
reason.
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Burger said, “If the school
can set curriculum, select teachers, and determine what books to purchase for
the school library, it surely can decide which books to discontinue or remove
from the school library.” Do you agree?
Tinker v.
Des Moines (1969)
The Court ruled that black armbands worn in protest of the
Vietnam War by public school students like Mary Beth Tinker were “pure speech,”
or symbolic speech, and were protected by the First
Amendment’s provisions for freedom of speech. The decision held: “First
Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school
environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued
that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of
speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate…”
10 Supreme Court Cases Every Teen Should Know by Tom Jacobs
NYTimes
Bethel School District v. Fraser (1986)
A school could suspend a pupil for giving a student government
nomination speech full of sexual innuendo and metaphor. “The First Amendment
does not [require] school officials…to permit a vulgar and lewd speech [that]
would undermine the school’s basic educational mission.”
The same reasoning was applied to a later case involving the free
speech rights of public school students, Hazelwood
v. Kuhlmeier (1988). It clarified the meaning of Tinker v.
Des Moines (1969) which addressed students’ rights to passive, individual
expression. The decision quoted Hugo Black’s dissent in Tinker v. Des Moines
(1969), which asserted that the Constitution does not
require “school officials to surrender control of the American public school
system to public school students.”
The case touched on constitutional principles including limits on
rights, and civic values including moderation, respect, and responsibility.
Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier (1988)
In this case about public school students’ First Amendment
rights to a free press, the
Court ruled that public school officials can censor school-sponsored,
student-produced newspapers, because the newspapers are part of the school
curriculum rather than a forum for public expression. As stated in Bethel v.
Fraser (1986), schools do not have to sponsor speech that is
inconsistent with their educational mission.
The ruling clarified the meaning of Tinker v.
Des Moines (1969), which addressed students’ rights to passive, individual
expression.
How
are these two cases similar and different?
What
are the general conclusions you can draw?
10 Supreme Court Cases Every Teen Should Know by Tom Jacobs
NYTimes
Morse v. Frederick (2007)
The decision in one of the most important student speech cases
to reach the Court in decades came at the end of last term. The case, Morse
v. Frederick, concerned the rights of a public school student to unfurl a
banner reading “Bong hits 4 Jesus” at a school-sponsored event held off school
grounds. We begin this school year with this landmark case on the rights of
public school students.
Joseph Frederick knew the Olympic Torch relay runner was close
and his anticipation grew stronger. Officials at his Juneau, Alaska school had
decided that students should be able to see the Olympic relay pass on its way
to the games in Salt Lake City, so a mini-field trip had been organized.
Students were taken outside, across the street from the school. They were
surrounded by television cameras and reporters, all hoping to the capture the
exciting event on film. Few people even noticed Frederick was carrying a
banner.
As the Olympic relay approached and cameras rolled, Frederick
and some fellow students unfurled the 14-foot banner. It read, “Bong Hits 4
Jesus.” (This was a slang reference to smoking marijuana.) The banner did not
create a disturbance, but Principal Deborah Morse told the students to take it
down. When Frederick refused, Morse took the banner away and later suspended
Frederick for ten days. She cited the school’s policy against materials
promoting illegal drugs.
Frederick denied that the banner promoted drug use. He
explained, “the words were just nonsense meant to attract television cameras.”
He believed the First Amendment protected his right to display this banner at a
public school event, and brought suit against Principal Morse. The Circuit
Court agreed with Frederick and ruled that because he had been punished for the
content of his speech (rather than any disturbance it caused), the school’s
actions were unconstitutional. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court.
The Court decided against Frederick and ruled 5-4 that public
school officials can censor student speech that could be reasonably understood
to promote illegal drugs. “The concern here is not that Frederick’s speech was
offensive, but that it was reasonably viewed as promoting illegal drug use.”
The Court explained that the free speech rights of students had to be
considered in light of the “special characteristics” of the school environment,
and that it was an important responsibility of schools to deter drug use among
young people.
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