The Supreme Court's decision in Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier, 484 US 260 (1988) continues to influence school districts and school officials in how they treat students' free speech rights and interests. If you or your student have a dispute with the school over First Amendment rights or related interests or another disciplinary issue with the school threatening educational and personal rights and interests, retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Student Defense Team for skilled representation. Our attorneys have helped hundreds of students nationwide successfully resolve First Amendment and other school issues, including academic progress and discipline issues. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form now to learn more about how we can help you or your student. Consider the following information on how Supreme Court case law, and in particular the case of Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier, may impact your school matter.
The Common Law's Role and Value
American courts follow the English common law tradition. That's why our attorneys, focusing their practice on academic administrative procedures, know Supreme Court education case law like the back of their hands. We are constantly researching, analyzing, and advocating Supreme Court cases and lower court cases following Supreme Court cases for the rules and principles those cases establish that we can put to our client's use to resolve their school disputes over student rights and interests. The power of the common law is that it proceeds case by case. One case informs another until attorneys and judges have a substantial body of case law on education subjects to draw from, interpret, and apply to resolve the next case. In that sense, the common law is democratic, real, and practical rather than top-down, hypothetical, and abstract. Civil code countries follow edicts handed down from their rulers, whether elected or not. Common law countries like the U.S. also have codes, but they ground law and interpret codes in the common law through a compilation of published cases. You should respect the common law as an organic and vital organ of a healthy American society. Our attorneys do, and they know how to use it for the best benefit in your school issue or dispute.
The Role and Impact of Supreme Court Education Law
You may wonder what possible role cases like the Supreme Court decision in Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier have on your school matter. School officials may or may not be generally aware of Supreme Court education law decisions. They may not have the legal education and training that our attorneys have or even the substantial skills and experience in academic administrative disciplinary hearings that our attorneys also have. However, school administrators and school disciplinarians are likely to know, at least in a broad outline, the rules and principles that Supreme Court cases like Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier establish. School officials generally follow practices, customs, and conventions that Supreme Court constitutional case law has mandated, influenced, or shaped. They may not know the law, but they follow the practices that the law requires simply by protocol, custom, and practice. And our attorneys know how to make them do so by invoking school administrative procedures. We sometimes also go to court for our students and other school clients. However, the bulk of education law practice is in academic administrative proceedings, from the school and district level up to the state education agency level. We have the substantial academic and administrative skills and experience you need for the best outcome in your school matters.
The Facts of Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier
The facts of a case influence the case's precedential value in later cases that attorneys must advocate and judges must decide. Your school matter may not be exactly like the facts of Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier. But the Hazelwood decision may still control or influence the outcome of your school matter if it's facts or factual context is near enough to your factual context for the facts to roughly equate.
In Hazelwood, public high school students wrote article drafts for an annual school newspaper in one of their courses teaching writing and journalism. According to school procedures for the annual end-of-year publication of the school newspaper, the teacher in the course presented the unpublished newspaper to the school principal for review. The principal identified two articles as inappropriate for publication. One article discussed student pregnancies, sexual activity, and birth control among the school's student population. The other article discussed the impact of parent divorces on the school's students. The teacher had already required the student authors to remove most student names or identifying information from the articles to protect their privacy. However, the principal felt that student readers could still potentially identify the involved students from the articles' context. The principal also felt that the article on student sexual activity was inappropriate for younger students at the school and that the article on parent divorce could strain relationships between a student whose quote critical of her divorced father appeared in the article. The principal, therefore, ordered the two articles to be pulled from the newspaper before their publication.
If your school matter or your student's school matter involves the publication of your views or your student's views in official school forums, then the Hazelwood case obviously applies to its facts. That's almost exactly what the Hazelwood case is about. However, Hazelwood could also apply to other similar factual contexts. Your matter does not need to involve a school newspaper. It might instead involve a school social media account, radio program, video service, or even student speech at a school conference, concert, or athletic event. Hazelwood's facts are probably close enough to cover student expressions in other school forums. Nor does your matter have to involve your views or your student's views on sensitive sexual or family matters. It might instead involve views on political, social, religious, or even business or legal matters. Let us help you draw appropriate parallels between the facts in the Hazelwood case and other Supreme Court and lower court case law to advocate your matter. Doing so is our school law experience, skill, and expertise.
Procedural Posture of Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier
The procedural posture of a case, meaning where the parties chose to pursue it and how it worked its way through the courts, also affects a decision's precedential value in later cases up for deciding. In Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier, three students who had authored or contributed to the controversial articles that the principal pulled sued in the local federal district court after graduating from the high school. The three students objected to the principal pulling their articles and demanded relief for the violation of their alleged right to have their articles included in the newspaper. The students' suit was against the school district and the involved school officials. The district court judge held a bench trial without a jury, after which the judge ruled that no violation of any right had occurred.
The students appealed their loss in the district court to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The federal appellate court reversed the district court's ruling, finding in favor of the students and holding that the principal had violated their rights by removing the offending articles. The school defendants sought Supreme Court review. After briefing and argument, the Supreme Court reversed the federal appellate court, holding, like the district court, that the principal had not violated the students' rights when pulling the two offending articles.
This procedural posture in Hazelwood, in which the case reached the Supreme Court, means that the decision binds all lower federal courts as controlling precedent. The decision is also a precedent for future Supreme Court decisions under the doctrine of stare decisis (in translation, to stand by a thing decided). Because the students sued in the federal system under federal law, the Supreme Court's decision also binds state courts deciding cases under the same federal constitutional rights and laws that the Supreme Court decided Hazelwood. Our attorneys can distinguish where Hazelwood and other Supreme Court authority applies or does not apply. We know how to advocate these education law decisions for your best school outcome.
Legal Claims in Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier
The claims that the parties advance in a case also affect the case's precedential value in future cases up for decision. Our attorneys look closely at the Supreme Court and other case law on the claims that our attorneys are considering pursuing through school administrative proceedings or the courts on behalf of our student clients and other school clients. Consult us for the laws, rules, and claims on which you and your student should rely for relief in your matters.
The students in Hazelwood alleged that the school defendants had violated their First Amendment free speech rights, as applied to the school defendants through the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause. Technically, the First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech” or other specified freedoms. Congress obviously made no law in the Hazelwood District or its high school related to the principal pulling the students' articles from the newspaper. But the Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process protections against state actors to mean that state actors, too, in addition to federal actors, must not violate certain Bill of Rights protections, including the First Amendment's free speech protection. The students in Hazelwood had First Amendment rights. The question was what the Supreme Court would do with those rights in the particular context in which the students asserted them.
Supreme Court's Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier Analysis
In rejecting the student's First and Fourteenth Amendments claim, the Supreme Court reasoned that the principal had followed a reasonable course toward fulfilling substantial school interests without unduly infringing on the student's free speech rights. The Supreme Court held that the school newspaper, in the way that the school curriculum treated it, was not a free public forum for students to express controversial views. The school instead made the newspaper a key part of the writing and journalism course that produced it. The Supreme Court thus held that students, parents, and other members of the school community would reasonably interpret articles in the school newspaper to represent, to some degree, the views of the school, at least to the point that the school tolerated or even endorsed them through publication in the special school forum. That is, in part, why the Supreme Court allowed the principal to control the newspaper forum by removing questionable articles.
The Supreme Court also held that the involved teacher, the principal, and the school curriculum all had legitimate instructional interests in guiding and controlling student speech in the newspaper forum. The teacher had a responsibility to instruct the students on how to protect the privacy of individuals contributing information and quotes to their stories. The teacher had another responsibility to teach students how to present only appropriate information to their audience. The Supreme Court reasoned that if the courts were to immunize students from instruction to ensure greater free speech in this context, the courts would be usurping instructional authority and undermining instructional programs.
The Supreme Court also held that the school had a legitimate interest in protecting students and parents from embarrassment, invasions of privacy, and relationship harm from the articles' disclosures of particular students' pregnancies, sexual activity, and use of birth control, and critical of a particular divorced parent. The school also held a legitimate interest in protecting younger students from encountering inappropriately mature or adult content in an official school forum. The Supreme Court held that these interests justified the principal's actions in pulling the articles, especially insofar as the principal and teacher had no time to have the students further edit the articles before the newspaper's end-of-the-year publication.
Your matter or your student's matter may or may not involve a similar forum, similar instructional concerns, or similar institutional responsibilities and interests. Our attorneys can analyze your matter or your student's matter under Supreme Court cases like Hazelwood and under lower court case law, federal and state statutes, state agency rules, and school district policies to advise you of rights in your matters and to pursue enforcement of those rights.
The Limits of Supreme Court Case Holdings
The holding of a case is the law, rule, or principle that attorneys and judges draw from the case's facts, legal claims, reasoning, and outcome. You may read various statements summarizing this or that Supreme Court case, whether in online commentary or even in official abstracts published by the courts or their opinion publishing services. Those statements may be useful guides as to the content of a case decision but are not necessarily the case's holding. Even if the court opinion itself states something to the effect of, “We hold...,” the statement that follows may not be the court's actual reasoning on the actual claim presented in the case, which is necessary to the case's actual outcome. Judges and lawyers disagree about holdings in cases, and not merely because of the poor drafting of a court's opinion. The common law values ambiguity that allows parties in subsequent cases to adjust a published case's holding to new cases and circumstances. You can't pin everything down, not even in law, not even in a court's published decision. Consult us about your rights or your student's rights so that we can research, analyze, and properly construe the case law as it applies to your matters.
The Holding of Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier
With that caution expressed, we give you these thoughts on the holdings of Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier. The Supreme Court teaches in the case that school teachers and other officials offering forums for student school publications within an instructional context do not violate student First Amendment rights when withholding student-produced material that does not meet instructional standards. Teachers and other school officials have greater rights to control student expression in the instructional setting and in school forums than in non-instructional activities and non-school forums on school grounds. School control of student expression in instructional settings and school forums should be for the purpose of maintaining instructional standards, not otherwise based on the content of the student's expression. These are the primary holdings in Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier.
Interpreting and Applying Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier
Our attorneys can help you interpret and apply these and other holdings from Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier in your own matter. Your matter may, for instance, have involved free speech in a non-school forum outside of an instructional setting. Other Supreme Court cases, like Tinker v Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 US 503 (1969), have recognized greater student free speech rights in those circumstances. Tinker held that a school's prohibition on student armbands, worn in protest of the Vietnam War, violated student First Amendment rights because armbands are not a school forum and did not involve instructional responsibilities and activities. Your matter may alternatively have involved actions by school officials that bore no reasonable relationship to any legitimate instructional or other school interest. For instance, rejecting your expression of political, religious, or other free speech views that you expressed in appropriate ways that do not violate any institutional interest or instructional objective may violate your rights. Let us help you evaluate your rights and interests under not only Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier but under all applicable authority, from Supreme Court cases on down.
Quotes from Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier
Another way that lawyers and judges use Supreme Court case decisions like Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier is to excerpt and quote them. The excerpts may not represent the case's holding. Supreme Court opinions, like opinions by other courts, state all manner of interesting things, only some of which bear directly on the case's outcome. Justices and judges also sometimes write dissenting opinions containing useful statements and principles, none of which reflect the case's holding. Three justices dissented from the majority opinion in Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier. In any case, below are some of the more interesting and valuable statements from the Hazelwood majority opinion, whether or not they involve the case's direct holding:
- “school facilities may be deemed to be public forums only if school authorities have ‘by policy or by practice' opened those facilities ‘for indiscriminate use by the general public'” [484 US 267];
- “educators are entitled to exercise greater control” over school-sponsored publications “to assure that participants learn whatever lessons the activity is designed to teach, that readers or listeners are not exposed to material that may be inappropriate for their level of maturity, and that the views of the individual speaker are not erroneously attributed to the school” [484 US 271];
- “a school must be able to set high standards for the student speech that is disseminated under its auspices,” including standards that “may be higher than those demanded by some newspaper publishers or theatrical producers in the ‘real' world” [484 US 271-272]; and
- “educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities, so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns” [484 US 273].
Premier Student Defense Attorneys Available
You can see from the above discussion the depth and breadth of knowledge that our attorneys have on education law matters. Do not retain an unqualified local criminal defense attorney or civil litigation attorney for your school matter. School matters are primarily administrative matters, not court matters, where the law, rules, and procedures all differ. If you or your student face First Amendment free speech or free expression issues on campus or a dispute with the school over other student rights and interests, retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Student Defense Team for our highly qualified representation and advocacy. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form now to tell us about your matter and to retain our skilled and experienced attorneys.
