Opinion ID: 744115
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Reasonable Public Official

Text: 33 Ianni further claims that at the time the photographs were suppressed, a reasonably objective chancellor of a large public university would not have known that the conduct violated the plaintiffs' constitutional rights. We again disagree. 15 34 As a basic matter, the Supreme Court stated in 1969 [i]t can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. Tinker, 393 U.S. at 506, 89 S.Ct. at 736. Indeed, a year earlier, the idea that a faculty member could be compelled to relinquish First Amendment rights in connection with employment at a public school was unequivocally rejected by the Supreme Court. Pickering v. Board of Educ., 391 U.S. 563, 568, 88 S.Ct. 1731, 1734-35, 20 L.Ed.2d 811 (1968). 35 Applying these long established tenets to this case, we note that our earlier quotation from Rosenberger, 515 U.S. at 829, 115 S.Ct. at 2517, links its observations on viewpoint discrimination within a nonpublic forum to Perry, 460 U.S. at 46, 103 S.Ct. at 955-56, a teacher speech case decided by the Supreme Court in 1983. Similarly, the language proscribing viewpoint discrimination found in Lamb's Chapel, 508 U.S. at 394, 113 S.Ct. at 2147-48, quotes directly from Cornelius, 473 U.S. at 806, 105 S.Ct. at 3451, a 1985 decision. In addition, Widmar 's holding prohibiting unreasonable discrimination among types of expression within a specific forum, clearly made in the context of an analysis of the purpose of the particular forum, was available as early as 1981. Widmar, 454 U.S. at 265-67, 277, 102 S.Ct. at 272-73, 278. 36 Judge Heaney, writing for a panel of this court, recently noted that once a controlling opinion has been decided, a constitutional right has been clearly established. 16 See Waddell v. Forney, 108 F.3d 889, 893 (8th Cir.1997). And, admittedly, [t]he contours of the right must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right. Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 640, 107 S.Ct. 3034, 3039, 97 L.Ed.2d 523 (1987). But, as noted by Judge McMillian in his opinion for the court in Hayes v. Long, 72 F.3d 70, 73 (8th Cir.1995), [t]his court has taken a broad view of what constitutes 'clearly established law' for the purposes of a qualified immunity inquiry. More particularly, he stated, with regard to clearly established law, that: 37 In order to determine whether a right is clearly established, it is not necessary that the Supreme Court has directly addressed the issue, nor does the precise action or omission in question need to have been held unlawful. In the absence of binding precedent, a court should look to all available decisional law including decisions of state courts, other circuits and district courts.... 38 Id. at 73-74 (quoting Norfleet v. Arkansas Dep't of Human Servs., 989 F.2d 289, 291 (8th Cir.1993)). 39 Here, of course, we have long established, binding precedent totally supportive of plaintiffs' claims. The Supreme Court and this court have both clearly and directly spoken on the subject on numerous occasions and in years long prior to the 1992 censorship by Ianni. Accordingly, Chancellor Ianni's not clearly established claim must be rejected. 17