Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/09pdf/08-1371.pdf
Page Number: 21.0

Cite as:  561 U. S. ____ (2010) 

15 

Opinion of the Court 

speaker  may  be  excluded  from”  a  limited  public  forum  “if 
he  is  not  a  member  of  the  class  of  speakers  for  whose 
especial benefit the forum was created.”). 

An  example  sharpens  the  tip  of  this  point:  Schools, 

including Hastings, see App. to Pet. for Cert. 83a, ordinar­
ily,  and  without  controversy,  limit  official  student-group 
recognition  to  organizations  comprising  only  students—
even  if  those  groups  wish  to  associate  with  nonstudents. 
See,  e.g.,  Volokh,  Freedom  of  Expressive  Association  and 
Government Subsidies, 58 Stan. L. Rev. 1919, 1940 (2006). 
The  same  ground  rules  must  govern  both  speech  and 
association challenges in the limited-public-forum context, 
lest  strict  scrutiny  trump  a  public  university’s  ability  to 
“confin[e]  a  [speech]  forum  to  the  limited  and  legitimate
purposes  for  which  it  was  created.”    Rosenberger,  515 
U. S., at 829.  See also Healy, 408 U. S., at 189 (“Associa­
tional activities need not be tolerated where they infringe 
reasonable campus rules.”). 

Third,  this  case  fits  comfortably  within  the  limited­
public-forum  category,  for  CLS,  in  seeking  what  is  effec­
tively a state subsidy, faces only indirect pressure to mod­
ify  its  membership  policies;  CLS  may  exclude  any  person
for any reason if it forgoes the benefits of official recogni­
tion.13    The  expressive-association  precedents  on  which 
CLS  relies,  in  contrast,  involved  regulations  that  com-
pelled  a  group  to  include  unwanted  members,  with  no
choice to opt out.  See, e.g., Dale, 530 U. S., at 648 (regula­
tion  “forc[ed]  [the  Boy  Scouts]  to  accept  members  it  [did] 
not  desire”  (internal  quotation  marks  omitted));  Roberts, 

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13 The fact that a university “expends funds to encourage a diversity 
of views from private speakers,” this Court has held, does not justify it 
in  “discriminat[ing]  based  on  the  viewpoint  of  private  persons  whose 
speech it facilitates.”  Rosenberger, 515 U. S., at 834.  Applying limited­
public-forum  analysis  (which  itself  prohibits  viewpoint  discrimination)
to  CLS’s  expressive  association  claim,  we  emphasize,  does  not  upset 
this principle.