First Amendment Rights In Schools Case Study

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Recommended: Why freedom of speech should be limited in schools

In Morse, Joseph Frederick, a student at a school supervised event, held up a banner with the message “Bong Hits 4 Jesus”. After he refused to take it down, Deborah Morse, the school principle, took the banner and suspended Frederick for 10 days. This punishment was based on his violation of school policy, which forbids the display of anything promoting illegal drug use. The Supreme Court held that schools are not violating a student’s First Amendment rights when they take measures to protect the students from the promotion of illegal drug use while under the supervision of the school.

The similarities between Morse and our case include the facts that both students were holding up signs mentioning marijuana and both were suspended for promoting …show more content…

Several high school and junior high school students were suspended from school for wearing the arm bands and refusing to remove them, although they knew of the school policy. They were told they could not return to school until they were not wearing the black arm bands. The Supreme Court said that it is not constitutionally allowable to ban one particular expression of opinion of politics when other expressions of political views are allowed to be displayed using other symbols. This is especially the case when none of the expressions are interfering with discipline or schoolwork. Therefore, the Supreme Court held that by creating a policy that does not allow students to wear black arm bands to school to show their opinion of the war does deny the students their right to free speech under the First …show more content…

The Supreme Court ruled that the school had the right to discipline Fraser as the First Amendment does not prevent school officials from determining that such vulgar speech undermines the basic educational mission. It also mentioned in the opinion that if the same speech would have been given in a public place and not during a school function, the government would not be able to censor the message. Although the only similarity of these two cases is the suspension of students, it is important to understand that the school has no power over the speech of students when they are in a public

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