A New York school district violated the First Amendment when it punished a high school student over an allegedly racist social media post, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The school’s interest in teaching “racial sensitivity” did not outweigh the student’s right to free speech off campus, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals concluded, reversing the lower court’s decision in favor of the Livingston Manor Central School District.
The high-school student, Case Leroy, was disciplined by his school after he took a picture with his friends and posted it on Snapchat. The picture, which was posted off campus and after school hours, showed Leroy lying on the ground of a parking lot with his friend kneeling on his neck, with the caption, “Cops got another.”
While Leroy intended his post as a joke, it sparked outrage from others who understandably viewed it as making light of the killing of George Floyd. He took the post down within minutes, but not before another student took a screenshot and made it go viral.
The damage was done. The school soon received multiple emails complaining that the posts were “racist” and would “make students feel unsafe,” urging officials to take disciplinary action against the students involved.
Days later, noting the need to address “racially offensive student speech and conduct,” the school suspended Leroy. He was barred from participating in extracurricular activities—including the senior prom and graduation—for the remainder of the year.
Leroy then sued the school district, claiming the punishment violated his First Amendment rights. Judge Nelson Román of the Southern District of New York ruled against him. Leroy’s post was not protected by the First Amendment, he concluded, due to the “substantial disruption” it caused in school.
On appeal, Leroy’s lawyers at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute argued that the school’s actions violated Supreme Court precedents in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) and, more recently, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. (2021).
In Mahanoy, the Court held a school violated the First Amendment when it punished a disgruntled student for her vulgar, off-campus social media posts cursing out the school after she failed to make the varsity cheerleading team.
Last week, the Second Circuit sided with Leroy. “[W]e cannot accept the contention that in today’s world, a social media post made off-campus is equivalent to speech on campus,” Judge Barrington Parker wrote on behalf of the federal appeals court.
“As in Mahanoy, the strength of the school’s interest in preventing certain kinds of speech—there, vulgarity, and here, racially insensitive speech—is weakened considerably” by the fact that Leroy spoke outside the school on his own time, the court ruled, concluding that Leroy’s off-campus speech fell outside the bounds of the school’s authority to regulate it.
Nor did the in-school disruption—a fifteen-to-twenty-minute school-wide assembly and a nine-minute demonstration by several students—justify restricting Leroy’s speech. Besides, the court noted, much of the disruption was driven by others, including other students, parents, and the school itself, responding to his online posts.
Facing the new reality—that social media is how today’s students communicate—the court concluded that “allowing schools to regulate all speech on social media as though it were on-campus speech risks preventing students from ‘engaging in that kind of speech at all.'”
This case should come as a relief to parents who won’t have to worry about their kids being suspended every time they say something stupid on social media.
Most of all, it’s a major win for free speech.
It’s also a win in the war against woke in public schools. The court makes clear that schools can’t regulate speech based on students’ hurt feelings, or there will be no limit to their power to punish speech they don’t like. “If schools can regulate off-campus expression because it upsets other students,” the court reasoned, “they are effectively authorized to prohibit students from expressing unpopular views—in or out of school.”
Finally, the court rejected the cancel-culture thinking that has taken over the country’s schools: “The ability to engage in civil discourse with those with whom we disagree is an essential feature of a liberal education,” Judge Parker concluded. “Teaching students that they can and should be sheltered from speech that offends them is not.”
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