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Friday, February 05, 2010
Courts - "Do 3rd Circuit Rulings Over Student Speech on MySpace Pages Contradict?"
An interesting article today by Shannon P. Duffy of The Legal Intelligencer begins:
Lawyers were scratching their heads on Thursday over a federal appellate court's seemingly conflicting rulings in a pair of closely watched student-speech cases that both involve high school students who were suspended for creating fake MySpace pages on their home computers to ridicule their principals.Although the cases appeared at first glance to raise nearly identical legal questions about the limits on a school's power to discipline students for off-campus speech, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the student in Layshock v. Hermitage School District and with the school in J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District.
In Layshock, a unanimous three-judge panel declared that punishing students for off-campus speech violates their First Amendment rights. But the Blue Mountain panel split, voting 2-1 in holding that students may be punished for lewd speech on the Internet about school officials that has the potential to create a substantial disturbance at the school.
For lawyers watching the cases, it became clear during oral arguments in December 2008 and June 2009 that the two panels weren't likely to agree. Since federal appellate courts cannot issue conflicting opinions, court watchers predicted that the entire court might be forced to rehear both cases before an en banc court.
Since Layshock was argued six months before Blue Mountain, some lawyers predicted that Layshock would be handed down first and its ruling would bind the panel in Blue Mountain.
But now the court has confounded the prognosticators by handing down a pair of decisions on the same day that reached opposite results.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 5, 2010 10:28 AM
Posted to Courts in general