May
15
Free Speech Further Defined and Limited
May 15, 2009 | Tagged freedom, law, speech | Leave a Comment
The name of this blog is Make No Laws. Voltairine de Cleyre said,
Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license”; and they will define and define freedom out of existence.
How right she was. Last May the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit in New York City ruled against a high school student who was punished by school administrators for exercising her free speech rights. She did call the administrators “douchbags” in an email but while someone may be offended at this, it is no justification for the school blocking the student from running for class secretary.
Part of the argument in support of this student was that the offending email was sent from her home. The school should not have the ability to punish a student for actions that did not take place on school property. The court’s decision stated,
We have determined, however, that a student may be disciplined for expressive conduct, even conduct occurring off school grounds, when this conduct “would foreseeably create a risk of substantial disruption within the school environment,” at least when it was similarly foreseeable that the off- campus expression might also reach campus.
How completely backwards is this? The student can be disciplined for creating a risk of disruption within the school. How about encouraging our students to be disruptive? That’s the kind of education that I would like to see. According to Howard Zinn, “education can, and should be, dangerous to the existing social structure.”
The ruling goes on to state that schools should impart “shared values,” to students
which include not only the importance of free expression but a “proper respect for authority”
Not only have we restricted free speech in this case, but we are also reducing the education system to nothing more than an official state system of indoctrination to someone’s arbitrary definition of “values.” I value the questioning of authority and the challenging of school and state regulations on my freedoms. The courts are supposedly where these values are defended, but in this case, and many others involving students, they fail miserably.
But what makes this case so crucial is that one of the judges in this decision is Sonia Sotomayer who is a leading candidate to replace Justice Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. This kind of restriction of basic First Amendment rights is troubling in itself, but having a Supreme Court justice who subscribes to this position is yet another indicator that Voltarine has been right all along.