Word: principall
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The case started in 2002, when the Juneau-Douglas High School in Alaska let students cross the street to watch the Olympic torch pass on its way to Salt Lake City. As TV cameras rolled, senior Joseph Frederick and several friends unfurled the infamous banner, thinking it was, according to...
The principal argued that she thought the message was about pot smoking and that it broke school rules against promoting illegal drugs, and Roberts agrees with her. He attempts a lawyerly gloss on the whole discussion by launching into an exegesis of the possible meanings of Bong Hits 4 Jesus...
But the problem, says Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in dissent, is that the Roberts opinion not only provides support for such a restriction, it invents "out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech...
In one of the better lines from Monday's opinions, Stevens explains that most students knew the bong-hits message had no meaning, because most of them "do not shed their brains at the schoolhouse gate." And so to allow schools to ban speech that merely alludes to drugs might...
We don't know whether the court took these factors into account in the Bong Hits opinion, but Roberts makes the point clearly enough. "School principals have a difficult job, and a vitally important one," he writes. "When Frederick suddenly and unexpectedly unfurled his banner, Morse (the principal) had to...