Source: https://www.thefire.org/first-amendment-library/decision/tinker-et-al-v-des-moines-independent-community-school-district-et-al/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 09:51:46+00:00

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FIRE > Featured > Homepage > TINKER et al. v. DES MOINES INDEPENDENT COMMUNITY SCHOOL DISTRICT et al.
Whether the wearing of armbands by public school students as a form of symbolic speech is protected by the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the students’ right to wear the armbands, overruling the Eighth Circuit.
After becoming aware of a plan among some students to protest the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands during school hours, school officials in Des Moines, Iowa, specifically banned wearing armbands in their schools. Previously, students had been allowed to wear “buttons relating to national political campaigns, and some even wore the Iron Cross, traditionally a symbol of Nazism.” The students wore the armbands in violation of the new policy, were suspended, and subsequently sued.
The Court established a speech-protective standard for students—that school officials cannot prohibit student expression unless they can reasonably forecast that the student speech will cause a substantial disruption of school activities or invades the rights of others. The Court affirmed that symbolic speech enjoys First Amendment protection, that students possess constitutional rights in public schools, and that “an undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance” is not enough to limit expressive rights. The Court held “that the wearing of armbands is ‘symbolic speech’ which is ‘akin’ to ‘pure speech’” and that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Additionally, the Supreme Court held that the protest did not seriously disturb learning or order at the school and that the ban on armbands “did not purport to prohibit the wearing of all symbols of political or controversial significance” but instead singled out these students’ particular viewpoint.
DES MOINES INDEPENDENT COMMUNITY SCHOOL DISTRICT ET AL.
Dan L. Johnston argued the cause for petitioners. With him on the brief were Melvin L. Wulf and David N. Ellenhorn. Allan A. Herrick argued the cause for respondents. With him on the brief were Herschel G. Langdon and David W. Belin. Charles Morgan, Jr., filed a brief for the United States National Student Association, as amicus curiae, urging reversal.
*504 MR. JUSTICE FORTAS delivered the opinion of the Court.
Petitioner John F. Tinker, 15 years old, and petitioner Christopher Eckhardt, 16 years old, attended high schools in Des Moines, Iowa. Petitioner Mary Beth Tinker, John’s sister, was a 13-year-old student in junior high school. In December 1965, a group of adults and students in Des Moines held a meeting at the Eckhardt home. The group determined to publicize their objections to the hostilities in Vietnam and their support for a truce by wearing black armbands during the holiday season and by fasting on December 16 and New Year’s Eve. Petitioners and their parents had previously engaged in similar activities, and they decided to participate in the program. The principals of the Des Moines schools became aware of the plan to wear armbands. On December 14, 1965, they met and adopted a policy that any student wearing an armband to school would be asked to remove it, and if he refused he would be suspended until he returned without the armband. Petitioners were aware of the regulation that the school authorities adopted. On December 16, Mary Beth and Christopher wore black armbands to their schools. John Tinker wore his armband the next day. They were all sent home and suspended from school until they would come back without their armbands. They did not return to school until after the planned period for wearing armbands had expired—that is, until after New Year’s Day. This complaint was filed in the United States District Court by petitioners, through their fathers, under § 1983 of Title 42 of the United States Code. It prayed for an injunction restraining the respondent school officials and the respondent members of the board of directors of the school district from disciplining the petitioners, and it sought nominal damages. After an evidentiary hearing the District Court dismissed the complaint. It upheld *505 the constitutionality of the school authorities’ action on the ground that it was reasonable in order to prevent disturbance of school discipline. 258 F. Supp. 971 (1966). The court referred to but expressly declined to follow the Fifth Circuit’s holding in a similar case that the wearing of symbols like the armbands cannot be prohibited unless it “materially and substantially interfere[s] with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.” Burnside v. Byars, 363 F. 2d 744, 749 (1966).
On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit considered the case en banc. The court was equally divided, and the District Court’s decision was accordingly affirmed, without opinion. 383 F. 2d 988 (1967). We granted certiorari. 390 U. S. 942 (1968).
The District Court recognized that the wearing of an armband for the purpose of expressing certain views is the type of symbolic act that is within the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. See West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624 (1943); Stromberg v. California, 283 U. S. 359 (1931). Cf. Thornhill v. Alabama, 310 U. S. 88 (1940); Edwards v. South Carolina, 372 U. S. 229 (1963); Brown v. Louisiana, 383 U. S. 131 (1966). As we shall discuss, the wearing of armbands in the circumstances of this case was entirely divorced from actually or potentially disruptive conduct by those participating in it. It was closely akin to “pure speech” *506 which, we have repeatedly held, is entitled to comprehensive protection under the First Amendment. Cf. Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536, 555 (1965); Adderley v. Florida, 385 U. S. 39 (1966).
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. This has been the unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years. In Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390 (1923), and Bartels v. Iowa, 262 U. S. 404 (1923), this Court, in opinions by Mr. Justice McReynolds, held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prevents States from forbidding the teaching of a foreign language to young students. Statutes to this effect, the Court held, unconstitutionally interfere with the liberty of teacher, student, and parent. See also Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 *507 U. S. 510 (1925); West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624 (1943); McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U. S. 203 (1948); Wieman v. Updegraff, 344 U. S. 183, 195 (1952) (concurring opinion); Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U. S. 234 (1957); Shelton v. Tucker, 364 U. S. 479, 487 (1960); Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S. 421 (1962); Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U. S. 589, 603 (1967); Epperson v. Arkansas, ante, p. 97 (1968).
“The Fourteenth Amendment, as now applied to the States, protects the citizen against the State itself and all of its creatures—Boards of Education not excepted. These have, of course, important, delicate, and highly discretionary functions, but none that they may not perform within the limits of the Bill of Rights. That they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.” 319 U. S., at 637.
The school officials banned and sought to punish petitioners for a silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of petitioners. There is here no evidence whatever of petitioners’ interference, actual or nascent, with the schools’ work or of collision with the rights of other students to be secure and to be let alone. Accordingly, this case does not concern speech or action that intrudes upon the work of the schools or the rights of other students.
The District Court concluded that the action of the school authorities was reasonable because it was based upon their fear of a disturbance from the wearing of the armbands. But, in our system, undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression. Any departure from absolute regimentation may cause trouble. Any variation from the majority’s opinion may inspire fear. Any word spoken, in class, in the lunchroom, or on the campus, that deviates from the views of another person may start an argument or cause a disturbance. But our Constitution says we must take this risk, Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U. S. 1 (1949); and our history says that it is this sort of hazardous freedom—this kind of openness—that is *509 the basis of our national strength and of the independence and vigor of Americans who grow up and live in this relatively permissive, often disputatious, society.
In order for the State in the person of school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, it must be able to show that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint. Certainly where there is no finding and no showing that engaging in the forbidden conduct would “materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school,” the prohibition cannot be sustained. Burnside v. Byars, supra, at 749.
In the present case, the District Court made no such finding, and our independent examination of the record fails to yield evidence that the school authorities had reason to anticipate that the wearing of the armbands would substantially interfere with the work of the school or impinge upon the rights of other students. Even an official memorandum prepared after the suspension that listed the reasons for the ban on wearing the armbands made no reference to the anticipation of such disruption.
It is also relevant that the school authorities did not purport to prohibit the wearing of all symbols of political or controversial significance. The record shows that students in some of the schools wore buttons relating to national political campaigns, and some even wore the Iron Cross, traditionally a symbol of Nazism. The order prohibiting the wearing of armbands did not extend to these. Instead, a particular symbol—black armbands worn to exhibit opposition to this Nation’s involvement *511 in Vietnam—was singled out for prohibition. Clearly, the prohibition of expression of one particular opinion, at least without evidence that it is necessary to avoid material and substantial interference with schoolwork or discipline, is not constitutionally permissible.
In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are “persons” under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State. In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved. In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views. As Judge Gewin, speaking for the Fifth Circuit, said, school officials cannot suppress “expressions of feelings with which they do not wish to contend.” Burnside v. Byars, supra, at 749.
The principle of these cases is not confined to the supervised and ordained discussion which takes place in the classroom. The principal use to which the schools are dedicated is to accommodate students during prescribed hours for the purpose of certain types of activities. Among those activities is personal intercommunication among the students. This is not only an inevitable part of the process of attending school; it is also an important part of the educational process. A student’s rights, therefore, do not embrace merely the classroom hours. When he is in the cafeteria, or on the playing field, or on *513 the campus during the authorized hours, he may express his opinions, even on controversial subjects like the conflict in Vietnam, if he does so without “materially and substantially interfer[ing] with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school” and without colliding with the rights of others. Burnside v. Byars, supra, at 749. But conduct by the student, in class or out of it, which for any reason—whether it stems from time, place, or type of behavior—materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others is, of course, not immunized by the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. Cf. Blackwell v. Issaquena County Board of Education, 363 F. 2d 749 (C. A. 5th Cir. 1966).
Under our Constitution, free speech is not a right that is given only to be so circumscribed that it exists in principle but not in fact. Freedom of expression would not truly exist if the right could be exercised only in an area that a benevolent government has provided as a safe haven for crackpots. The Constitution says that Congress (and the States) may not abridge the right to free speech. This provision means what it says. We properly read it to permit reasonable regulation of speech-connected activities in carefully restricted circumstances. But we do not confine the permissible exercise of First Amendment rights to a telephone booth or the four corners of a pamphlet, or to supervised and ordained discussion in a school classroom.
If a regulation were adopted by school officials forbidding discussion of the Vietnam conflict, or the expression by any student of opposition to it anywhere on school property except as part of a prescribed classroom exercise, it would be obvious that the regulation would violate the constitutional rights of students, at least if it could not be justified by a showing that the students’ activities would materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school. Cf. Hammond *514 v. South Carolina State College, 272 F. Supp. 947 (D. C. S. C. 1967) (orderly protest meeting on state college campus); Dickey v. Alabama State Board of Education, 273 F. Supp. 613 (D. C. M. D. Ala. 1967) (expulsion of student editor of college newspaper). In the circumstances of the present case, the prohibition of the silent, passive “witness of the armbands,” as one of the children called it, is no less offensive to the Constitution’s guarantees.
Although I agree with much of what is said in the Court’s opinion, and with its judgment in this case, I *515 cannot share the Court’s uncritical assumption that, school discipline aside, the First Amendment rights of children are co-extensive with those of adults. Indeed, I had thought the Court decided otherwise just last Term in Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U. S. 629. I continue to hold the view I expressed in that case: “[A] State may permissibly determine that, at least in some precisely delineated areas, a child—like someone in a captive audience—is not possessed of that full capacity for individual choice which is the presupposition of First Amendment guarantees.” Id., at 649-650 (concurring in result). Cf. Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U. S. 158.
While I join the Court’s opinion, I deem it appropriate to note, first, that the Court continues to recognize a distinction between communicating by words and communicating by acts or conduct which sufficiently impinges on some valid state interest; and, second, that I do not subscribe to everything the Court of Appeals said about free speech in its opinion in Burnside v. Byars, 363 F. 2d 744, 748 (C. A. 5th Cir. 1966), a case relied upon by the Court in the matter now before us.
The Court’s holding in this case ushers in what I deem to be an entirely new era in which the power to control pupils by the elected “officials of state supported public schools . . .” in the United States is in ultimate effect transferred to the Supreme Court. The Court brought *516 this particular case here on a petition for certiorari urging that the First and Fourteenth Amendments protect the right of school pupils to express their political views all the way “from kindergarten through high school.” Here the constitutional right to “political expression” asserted was a right to wear black armbands during school hours and at classes in order to demonstrate to the other students that the petitioners were mourning because of the death of United States soldiers in Vietnam and to protest that war which they were against. Ordered to refrain from wearing the armbands in school by the elected school officials and the teachers vested with state authority to do so, apparently only seven out of the school system’s 18,000 pupils deliberately refused to obey the order. One defying pupil was Paul Tinker, 8 years old, who was in the second grade; another, Hope Tinker, was 11 years old and in the fifth grade; a third member of the Tinker family was 13, in the eighth grade; and a fourth member of the same family was John Tinker, 15 years old, an 11th grade high school pupil. Their father, a Methodist minister without a church, is paid a salary by the American Friends Service Committee. Another student who defied the school order and insisted on wearing an armband in school was Christopher Eckhardt, an 11th grade pupil and a petitioner in this case. His mother is an official in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
While the record does not show that any of these armband students shouted, used profane language, or were violent in any manner, detailed testimony by some of them shows their armbands caused comments, warnings by other students, the poking of fun at them, and a warning by an older football player that other, nonprotesting students had better let them alone. There is also evidence that a teacher of mathematics had his lesson period practically “wrecked” chiefly by disputes with Mary Beth Tinker, who wore her armband for her “demonstration.” *518 Even a casual reading of the record shows that this armband did divert students’ minds from their regular lessons, and that talk, comments, etc., made John Tinker “self-conscious” in attending school with his armband. While the absence of obscene remarks or boisterous and loud disorder perhaps justifies the Court’s statement that the few armband students did not actually “disrupt” the classwork, I think the record overwhelmingly shows that the armbands did exactly what the elected school officials and principals foresaw they would, that is, took the students’ minds off their classwork and diverted them to thoughts about the highly emotional subject of the Vietnam war. And I repeat that if the time has come when pupils of state-supported schools, kindergartens, grammar schools, or high schools, can defy and flout orders of school officials to keep their minds on their own schoolwork, it is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the judiciary. The next logical step, it appears to me, would be to hold unconstitutional laws that bar pupils under 21 or 18 from voting, or from being elected members of the boards of education.
“There was a time when the Due Process Clause was used by this Court to strike down laws which were thought unreasonable, that is, unwise or incompatible with some particular economic or social philosophy.
The Ferguson case totally repudiated the old reasonableness-due process test, the doctrine that judges have the power to hold laws unconstitutional upon the belief of judges that they “shock the conscience” or that they are *520 “unreasonable,” “arbitrary,” “irrational,” “contrary to fundamental `decency,’ ” or some other such flexible term without precise boundaries. I have many times expressed my opposition to that concept on the ground that it gives judges power to strike down any law they do not like. If the majority of the Court today, by agreeing to the opinion of my Brother FORTAS, is resurrecting that old reasonableness-due process test, I think the constitutional change should be plainly, unequivocally, and forthrightly stated for the benefit of the bench and bar. It will be a sad day for the country, I believe, when the present-day Court returns to the McReynolds due process concept. Other cases cited by the Court do not, as implied, follow the McReynolds reasonableness doctrine. West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, clearly rejecting the “reasonableness” test, held that the Fourteenth Amendment made the First applicable to the States, and that the two forbade a State to compel little schoolchildren to salute the United States flag when they had religious scruples against doing so. Neither Thornhill v. Alabama, 310 U. S. 88; Stromberg v. California, 283 U. S. 359; Edwards *521 v. South Carolina, 372 U. S. 229; nor Brown v. Louisiana, 383 U. S. 131, related to schoolchildren at all, and none of these cases embraced Mr. Justice McReynolds’ reasonableness test; and Thornhill, Edwards, and Brown relied on the vagueness of state statutes under scrutiny to hold them unconstitutional. Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536, 555, and Adderley v. Florida, 385 U. S. 39, cited by the Court as a “compare,” indicating, I suppose, that these two cases are no longer the law, were not rested to the slightest extent on the Meyer and Bartels “reasonableness-due process-McReynolds” constitutional test.
I deny, therefore, that it has been the “unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years” that “students” and “teachers” take with them into the “schoolhouse gate” constitutional rights to “freedom of speech or expression.” Even Meyer did not hold that. It makes no reference to “symbolic speech” at all; what it did was to strike down as “unreasonable” and therefore unconstitutional a Nebraska law barring the teaching of the German language before the children reached the eighth grade. One can well agree with Mr. Justice Holmes and Mr. Justice Sutherland, as I do, that such a law was no more unreasonable than it would be to bar the teaching of Latin and Greek to pupils who have not reached the eighth grade. In fact, I think the majority’s reason for invalidating the Nebraska law was that it did not like it or in legal jargon that it “shocked the Court’s conscience,” “offended its sense of justice,” or was “contrary to fundamental concepts of the English-speaking world,” as the Court has sometimes said. See, e. g., Rochin v. California, 342 U. S. 165, and Irvine v. California, 347 U. S. 128. The truth is that a teacher of kindergarten, grammar school, or high school pupils no more carries into a school with him a complete right to freedom of speech and expression than an anti-Catholic or anti-Semite carries with him a complete freedom of *522 speech and religion into a Catholic church or Jewish synagogue. Nor does a person carry with him into the United States Senate or House, or into the Supreme Court, or any other court, a complete constitutional right to go into those places contrary to their rules and speak his mind on any subject he pleases. It is a myth to say that any person has a constitutional right to say what he pleases, where he pleases, and when he pleases. Our Court has decided precisely the opposite. See, e. g., Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536, 555; Adderley v. Florida, 385 U. S. 39.
In my view, teachers in state-controlled public schools are hired to teach there. Although Mr. Justice McReynolds may have intimated to the contrary in Meyer v. Nebraska, supra, certainly a teacher is not paid to go into school and teach subjects the State does not hire him to teach as a part of its selected curriculum. Nor are public school students sent to the schools at public expense to broadcast political or any other views to educate and inform the public. The original idea of schools, which I do not believe is yet abandoned as worthless or out of date, was that children had not yet reached the point of experience and wisdom which enabled them to teach all of their elders. It may be that the Nation has outworn the old-fashioned slogan that “children are to be seen not heard,” but one may, I hope, be permitted to harbor the thought that taxpayers send children to school on the premise that at their age they need to learn, not teach.
It was on the foregoing argument that this Court sustained the power of Mississippi to curtail the First Amendment’s right of peaceable assembly. And the same reasons are equally applicable to curtailing in the States’ public schools the right to complete freedom of expression. Iowa’s public schools, like Mississippi’s university, are operated to give students an opportunity to learn, not to talk politics by actual speech, or by “symbolic” *524 speech. And, as I have pointed out before, the record amply shows that public protest in the school classes against the Vietnam war “distracted from that singleness of purpose which the State [here Iowa] desired to exist in its public educational institutions.” Here the Court should accord Iowa educational institutions the same right to determine for themselves to what extent free expression should be allowed in its schools as it accorded Mississippi with reference to freedom of assembly. But even if the record were silent as to protests against the Vietnam war distracting students from their assigned class work, members of this Court, like all other citizens, know, without being told, that the disputes over the wisdom of the Vietnam war have disrupted and divided this country as few other issues ever have. Of course students, like other people, cannot concentrate on lesser issues when black armbands are being ostentatiously displayed in their presence to call attention to the wounded and dead of the war, some of the wounded and the dead being their friends and neighbors. It was, of course, to distract the attention of other students that some students insisted up to the very point of their own suspension from school that they were determined to sit in school with their symbolic armbands.
Change has been said to be truly the law of life but sometimes the old and the tried and true are worth holding. The schools of this Nation have undoubtedly contributed to giving us tranquility and to making us a more law-abiding people. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable liberty is an enemy to domestic peace. We cannot close our eyes to the fact that some of the country’s greatest problems are crimes committed by the youth, too many of school age. School discipline, like parental discipline, is an integral and important part of training our children to be good citizens—to be better citizens. Here a very small number of students have crisply and summarily *525 refused to obey a school order designed to give pupils who want to learn the opportunity to do so. One does not need to be a prophet or the son of a prophet to know that after the Court’s holding today some students in Iowa schools and indeed in all schools will be ready, able, and willing to defy their teachers on practically all orders. This is the more unfortunate for the schools since groups of students all over the land are already running loose, conducting break-ins, sit-ins, lie-ins, and smash-ins. Many of these student groups, as is all too familiar to all who read the newspapers and watch the television news programs, have already engaged in rioting, property seizures, and destruction. They have picketed schools to force students not to cross their picket lines and have too often violently attacked earnest but frightened students who wanted an education that the pickets did not want them to get. Students engaged in such activities are apparently confident that they know far more about how to operate public school systems than do their parents, teachers, and elected school officials. It is no answer to say that the particular students here have not yet reached such high points in their demands to attend classes in order to exercise their political pressures. Turned loose with lawsuits for damages and injunctions against their teachers as they are here, it is nothing but wishful thinking to imagine that young, immature students will not soon believe it is their right to control the schools rather than the right of the States that collect the taxes to hire the teachers for the benefit of the pupils. This case, therefore, wholly without constitutional reasons in my judgment, subjects all the public schools in the country to the whims and caprices of their loudest-mouthed, but maybe not their brightest, students. I, for one, am not fully persuaded that school pupils are wise enough, even with this Court’s expert help from Washington, to run the 23,390 public school *526 systems in our 50 States. I wish, therefore, wholly to disclaim any purpose on my part to hold that the Federal Constitution compels the teachers, parents, and elected school officials to surrender control of the American public school system to public school students. I dissent.
I certainly agree that state public school authorities in the discharge of their responsibilities are not wholly exempt from the requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment respecting the freedoms of expression and association. At the same time I am reluctant to believe that there is any disagreement between the majority and myself on the proposition that school officials should be accorded the widest authority in maintaining discipline and good order in their institutions. To translate that proposition into a workable constitutional rule, I would, in cases like this, cast upon those complaining the burden of showing that a particular school measure was motivated by other than legitimate school concerns —for example, a desire to prohibit the expression of an unpopular point of view, while permitting expression of the dominant opinion.
 In Burnside, the Fifth Circuit ordered that high school authorities be enjoined from enforcing a regulation forbidding students to wear “freedom buttons.” It is instructive that in Blackwell v. Issaquena County Board of Education, 363 F. 2d 749 (1966), the same panel on the same day reached the opposite result on different facts. It declined to enjoin enforcement of such a regulation in another high school where the students wearing freedom buttons harassed students who did not wear them and created much disturbance.
 Hamilton v. Regents of Univ. of Cal., 293 U. S. 245 (1934), is sometimes cited for the broad proposition that the State may attach conditions to attendance at a state university that require individuals to violate their religious convictions. The case involved dismissal of members of a religious denomination from a land grant college for refusal to participate in military training. Narrowly viewed, the case turns upon the Court’s conclusion that merely requiring a student to participate in school training in military “science” could not conflict with his constitutionally protected freedom of conscience. The decision cannot be taken as establishing that the State may impose and enforce any conditions that it chooses upon attendance at public institutions of learning, however violative they may be of fundamental constitutional guarantees. See, e. g., West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624 (1943); Dixon v. Alabama State Board of Education, 294 F. 2d 150 (C. A. 5th Cir. 1961); Knight v. State Board of Education, 200 F. Supp. 174 (D. C. M. D. Tenn. 1961); Dickey v. Alabama State Board of Education, 273 F. Supp. 613 (D. C. M. D. Ala. 1967). See also Note, Unconstitutional Conditions, 73 Harv. L. Rev. 1595 (1960); Note, Academic Freedom, 81 Harv. L. Rev. 1045 (1968).
 The District Court found that the school authorities, in prohibiting black armbands, were influenced by the fact that “[t]he Viet Nam war and the involvement of the United States therein has been the subject of a major controversy for some time. When the arm band regulation involved herein was promulgated, debate over the Viet Nam war had become vehement in many localities. A protest march against the war had been recently held in Washington, D. C. A wave of draft card burning incidents protesting the war had swept the country. At that time two highly publicized draft card burning cases were pending in this Court. Both individuals supporting the war and those opposing it were quite vocal in expressing their views.” 258 F. Supp., at 972-973.
 In Hammond v. South Carolina State College, 272 F. Supp. 947 (D. C. S. C. 1967), District Judge Hemphill had before him a case involving a meeting on campus of 300 students to express their views on school practices. He pointed out that a school is not like a hospital or a jail enclosure. Cf. Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536 (1965); Adderley v. Florida, 385 U. S. 39 (1966). It is a public place, and its dedication to specific uses does not imply that the constitutional rights of persons entitled to be there are to be gauged as if the premises were purely private property. Cf. Edwards v. South Carolina, 372 U. S. 229 (1963); Brown v. Louisiana, 383 U. S. 131 (1966).
“BELLINGHAM, Mass. (AP)—Todd R. Hennessy, 16, has filed nominating papers to run for town park commissioner in the March election.
Public school students “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Tinker v. Des Moines (1969). Such rights must, however, be considered in the context of “the special characteristics of the school environment.” This means that while public school students possess free speech rights at school, school officials can regulate speech more as educators than governments can as sovereign.
In a free speech victory, Ohio University students arrested last month for protesting in the school’s Baker University Center rotunda will not face further criminal prosecution or be subject to school sanctions.
Her journey started with wearing a black armband to school and proceeded to the landmark Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District (1969), but it by no means stopped there: Mary Beth Tinker, namesake of the Tinker decision, continues to be a free-speech icon.
In a disappointing development, the Supreme Court of the United States today declined to hear an appeal from the 2015 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Bell v. Itawamba County School Board.
As FIRE staff members have observed before, universities sometimes punish students (or threaten to punish students) for constitutionally protected expression under the theory that it does not comport with “professional codes” or standards, in cases where students are training to be teachers or nurses, for example. While professional codes may validly regulate professional conduct, they should not be used to restrict a student’s expression of ideas with which administrators may disagree—yet that is precisely what is happening in cases like Oyama.
Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit became the most recent of the federal circuit courts to expand the power of secondary schools to punish students for their off-campus Internet speech. In an en banc decision in Bell v. Itawamba County School Board, the Fifth Circuit took a significant bite out of students’ First Amendment rights outside the schoolhouse gates. The decision sets a disappointing precedent that will not only impact students in elementary, junior high, and high school, but could very well leak onto college campuses.

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