hazelwood v. kuhlmeier
Year: 1988
Result: 5-3, favor Hazelwood
Related Constitutional issue/Amendment: 1st Amendment (freedom of speech and press)
Civil rights or Civil liberties: Civil liberties
Significance/precedent: Schools were allowed to censor their newspapers. Newspapers were not seen as a venue of "political expression" rather, they were more closely connected to teaching and education and therefore subject to higher standards. Schools did not need to allow any form of speech that was "uncivilized" to be expressed through a school sanctioned entity.
Quote from majority opinion: "In sum, we cannot reject as unreasonable Principal Reynolds' conclusion that neither the pregnancy article nor the divorce article was suitable for publication in Spectrum. Reynolds could reasonably have concluded that the students who had written and edited these articles had not sufficiently mastered those portions of the Journalism II curriculum that pertained to the treatment of controversial issues and personal attacks, the need to protect the privacy of individuals whose most intimate concerns are to be revealed in the newspaper, and 'the legal, moral, and ethical restrictions imposed upon journalists within [a] school community' that includes adolescent subjects and readers. Finally, we conclude that the principal's decision to delete two pages of Spectrum, rather than to delete only the offending articles or to require that they be modified, was reasonable under the circumstances as he understood them. Accordingly, no violation of First Amendment rights occurred."
Summary of dissent: Based on the Tinker decision, in order for a violation of 1st Amendment rights to be acceptable, the speech that is being suppressed must "materially disrupt" the educational process of schools. The articles that were edited out of the school newspaper by the principal did not cause any disruption of this manner. Students were being taught to discount rather than respect the diversity of different ideas.
6-word summary: school paper: censored without violating First
Result: 5-3, favor Hazelwood
Related Constitutional issue/Amendment: 1st Amendment (freedom of speech and press)
Civil rights or Civil liberties: Civil liberties
Significance/precedent: Schools were allowed to censor their newspapers. Newspapers were not seen as a venue of "political expression" rather, they were more closely connected to teaching and education and therefore subject to higher standards. Schools did not need to allow any form of speech that was "uncivilized" to be expressed through a school sanctioned entity.
Quote from majority opinion: "In sum, we cannot reject as unreasonable Principal Reynolds' conclusion that neither the pregnancy article nor the divorce article was suitable for publication in Spectrum. Reynolds could reasonably have concluded that the students who had written and edited these articles had not sufficiently mastered those portions of the Journalism II curriculum that pertained to the treatment of controversial issues and personal attacks, the need to protect the privacy of individuals whose most intimate concerns are to be revealed in the newspaper, and 'the legal, moral, and ethical restrictions imposed upon journalists within [a] school community' that includes adolescent subjects and readers. Finally, we conclude that the principal's decision to delete two pages of Spectrum, rather than to delete only the offending articles or to require that they be modified, was reasonable under the circumstances as he understood them. Accordingly, no violation of First Amendment rights occurred."
Summary of dissent: Based on the Tinker decision, in order for a violation of 1st Amendment rights to be acceptable, the speech that is being suppressed must "materially disrupt" the educational process of schools. The articles that were edited out of the school newspaper by the principal did not cause any disruption of this manner. Students were being taught to discount rather than respect the diversity of different ideas.
6-word summary: school paper: censored without violating First