A middle-school student uses Twitter to chat with friends about her anger over losing her boyfriend to another girl.
Author: Frank LoMonte
Public-records research homework: Does your college expel suicidal students?
While colleges are free to remove students from campus if they present a realistic threat to harm other people, it's less clear what they can -- or should -- do when a student's only danger is to himself.The U.S.
Kansas Regents are backpedaling on controlling employees’ off-campus online lives. Why should they even want to try?
I've got a column on today's Inside Higher Ed that looks from a constitutional-law perspective at how badly the Kansas Board of Regents overreached in trying to make just about anything an employee says on the Internet grounds for disciplinary action, including firing.As I explain in the essay, the Supreme Court made what should have been understood as a minor exception to the First Amendment in a 2006 case called Garcetti v.
On the SPLC podcast: New Medill database raises questions about patterns in prosecuting “shaken baby” cases
The sudden and mysterious death of an infant is a tragedy so wrenching that the justice system faces especially intense pressure to make certain that no killing goes unpunished.
Green light for public access to police records in Washington, STOP sign in Kentucky
Write-ups of police investigations are among journalists' most-wanted public records -- and among the hardest to obtain.
Kansas Regents provoke academic freedom firestorm with policy forbidding “improper” online speech
If members of the Kansas Board of Regents have a low tolerance for unkind online speech, they'd best keep their browsers closed.
Student activist’s First Amendment case against Valdosta State president faces key appeals-court showdown
Six years after Thomas Hayden Barnes was tossed out of college without warning for vociferously criticizing a plan to replace campus greenspace with parking garages, his First Amendment claim still awaits a day in court.That day is a bit closer with an argument docketed at the Atlanta-based Eleventh Circuit U.S.
First Amendment groups ask federal appeals court to overturn Hazelwood-based removal of Hawaii college student
Can a student be kicked out of a degree program at a public university because those in charge of his department think his ideas are outside the mainstream of his intended profession?That's the issue presented by a just-filed case before the Ninth U.S.
Mary Beth Tinker closes one more chapter in the history books, and turns the page to another
"Inspiring." "Powerful." "Life changing." That's what young people across America had to say when Mary Beth Tinker's magical freedom bus came through their towns.There was understandable skepticism when Mary Beth and her attorney "copilot," Mike Hiestand, announced plans for a nationwide tour to reignite young people's passion for the First Amendment.
For-profit Kentucky college sanctioned $126,000 after “meritless” claim of FERPA secrecy
Colleges are adept at frivolously crying "student privacy!" to conceal information that might expose institutional wrongdoing, but one Kentucky college is learning that misuse of the federal student confidentiality statute can carry a heavy price.A circuit court judge in Franklin County, Ky., is fining Lexington-based National College $1,000 per day for raising unfounded legal arguments in refusing to obey a subpoena from the state's attorney general, Jack Conway, demanding disclosure of internal college records dealing with marketing, employee compensation, student complaints and other management practices.The attorney general's office is seeking National's records as part of an ongoing lawsuit that alleges National made deceptive advertising claims inflating the successful job-placement rate of its graduates.