Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 306.0

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Unit: $U39

[09-26-01 13:21:31] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 529 U. S. 217 (2000)

231

Opinion of the Court

sentative.”
Id., at 234. The principles outlined in Abood
provided the foundation for our later decision in Keller.
There we held that lawyers admitted to practice in California
could be required to join a state bar association and to fund
activities “germane” to the association’s mission of “regulat-
ing the legal profession and improving the quality of legal
services.”
496 U. S., at 13–14. The lawyers could not, how-
ever, be required to fund the bar association’s own political
expression.

Id., at 16.

The proposition that students who attend the University
cannot be required to pay subsidies for the speech of other
students without some First Amendment protection follows
from the Abood and Keller cases. Students enroll in public
universities to seek fulﬁllment of their personal aspirations
and of their own potential.
If the University conditions the
opportunity to receive a college education, an opportunity
comparable in importance to joining a labor union or bar as-
sociation, on an agreement to support objectionable, extra-
curricular expression by other students, the rights acknowl-
edged in Abood and Keller become implicated.
It infringes
on the speech and beliefs of the individual to be required, by
this mandatory student activity fee program, to pay subsi-
dies for the objectionable speech of others without any recog-
nition of the State’s corresponding duty to him or her. Yet
recognition must be given as well to the important and sub-
stantial purposes of the University, which seeks to facilitate
a wide range of speech.

In Abood and Keller, the constitutional rule took the form
of limiting the required subsidy to speech germane to the
purposes of the union or bar association. The standard of
germane speech as applied to student speech at a university
is unworkable, however, and gives insufﬁcient protection
both to the objecting students and to the University program
itself. Even in the context of a labor union, whose functions
are, or so we might have thought, well known and under-
stood by the law and the courts after a long history of gov-