The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a Pennsylvania high school violated the First Amendment rights of a cheerleader by punishing her for using vulgar language that criticized the school on social media.
The 8-1 opinion upheld lower court rulings against Mahanoy Area High School’s decision to suspend then-student Brandi Levy from her junior varsity cheerleading squad for one year over two Snapchat posts she sent while off school grounds.
The justices had weighed whether a 1969 Supreme Court ruling, which held that public schools have the ability to regulate certain speech, applied in a case where the speech did not occur on campus.
In its decision Wednesday, the Supreme Court said “courts must be more skeptical of a school’s efforts to regulate off-campus speech, for doing so may mean the student cannot engage in that kind of speech at all.”
“The school itself has an interest in protecting a student’s unpopular expression, especially when the expression takes place off campus,” because “America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy,” wrote Justice Stephen Breyer, who authored the majority opinion.
read more here: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/23/supreme-court-rules-for-pennsylvania-cheerleader-in-school-free-speech-case.html
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