A federal district judge sided with school disciplinarians in a First Amendment case involving a joke posted to Facebook, but the court also struck down as unconstitutional a school policy that made "inappropriate" speech a punishable disciplinary offense if there was any possibility of disruption at school.
The court ruled that the University of Kansas overreached when it expelled a student for posting profane tweets about his ex-girlfriend while under a no-contact order. The university had also cited Title IX.
The Court ruled in favor of Anthony Elonis, a Pennsylvania man who was convicted in 2010 under a federal threat-speech statute for violent language he used on Facebook to describe his wife, local elementary schools and an FBI agent.
Three years after Maryland became the first state to protect employees’ social-media lives from their employers’ purview, it could soon become the next state to grant similar protections to students.
Sen. Ronald Young, a Democrat, introduced a bill on Feb. 2 to prohibit school officials from requiring or asking students to give administrators access to their social media accounts.
Media outlets cited a 2014 law and misinterpreted the year-old law and a recent amendment to the Illinois school code, said Josh Sharp, the director of government affairs for the Illinois Press Association.
While school officials often say such searches are necessary to combat cyberbullying and other illegal activity, several lawmakers and free speech advocates argue efforts to regulate off-campus speech are an invasion of students’ privacy.
Huntsville City Schools Superintendent Casey Wardynski told a reporter with AL.com the district launched a secret program 18 months ago to monitor students’ social media sites.
In a new law journal article, Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, makes a case for why universities shouldn’t regulate student-athletes’ social media accounts and online speech.“What makes social media novel and empowering — that it is an immediate, unfiltered way to ‘speak’ with thousands of people — is also what makes it frightening to campus regulators,” LoMonte writes.
At a public institution, the First Amendment protects students' ability to express themselves free from government sanction, and the Due Process Clause protects against the removal of public benefits in an arbitrary way or without adequate notice.
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.