Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier
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| Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier | ||||||||||||
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 Supreme Court of the United States |
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| Argued October 13, 1987 Decided January 13, 1988 |
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| Holding | ||||||||||||
| The Court held that public school curricular student newspapers that have not been established as forums for student expression are subject to a lower level of First Amendment protection than independent student expression or newspapers established (by policy or practice) as forums for student expression. | ||||||||||||
| Court membership | ||||||||||||
| Chief Justice: William Rehnquist Associate Justices: William J. Brennan, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy |
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| Case opinions | ||||||||||||
| Majority by: White Joined by: Rehnquist, Stevens, O'Connor, Scalia Dissent by: Brennan Joined by: Marshall, Blackmun Kennedy took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. |
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| Laws applied | ||||||||||||
| U.S. Const. amend. I | ||||||||||||
Hazelwood School District et al. v. Kuhlmeier et al., 484 U.S. 260 (1988) was a United States Supreme Court decision that held that public school curricular student newspapers that have not been established as forums for student expression are subject to a lower level of First Amendment protection than independent student expression or newspapers established (by policy or practice) as forums for student expression. It was decided on January 13, 1988 in favor of Hazelwood School District, overruling a Court of Appeals reversal of a District Court ruling.
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[edit] The Case
In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court held for the first time that public school officials may impose some limits on what appears in school-sponsored student publications.
The high school paper was published as part of a journalism class. The principal at Hazelwood usually reviewed the school paper before it was published, but in this case he deleted two articles the staff had written.
One of the deleted articles covered the issue of student pregnancy and included interviews with three students who had become pregnant while attending school. (There was also an article about several students whose parents had been divorced, however their names were disclosed in the article.) To keep the students' identity secret the staff used pseudonyms instead of the students' names. The principal said he felt the anonymity of the students was not sufficiently protected and that the girls' discussion of their use or non-use of birth control was inappropriate for some of the younger students at the school. The students filed a lawsuit against the district. The trial court sided with the school and the appeals court sided with the students. By a vote of 5 to 3, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the school.
[edit] Basis
The First Amendment's freedom of speech protections were not violated by the school district because the First Amendment protection for student expression described in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 1969, does not compel a public school to affirmatively sponsor speech that conflicts with its "legitimate pedagogical goals." The school-financed newspaper at issue was also not considered to be a public forum under the totality of circumstances present in the case, and therefore, its editors were entitled to a lower level of First Amendment protection than is applicable to independent student newspapers or those newspapers that have, by policy or practice, opened their pages to student opinion.
[edit] Precedent
Under the First Amendment, school officials can censor non-forum student newspapers when they can justify their decision by stating a legitimate educational purpose. However, this does not allow school officials to censor articles wantonly or based on personal opinion, as shown in Dean v. Utica.
Some states have passed laws guaranteeing that non-forum newspapers, such as the Hazelwood East High School newspaper, have greater rights than the First Amendment requires.[1]
[edit] Aftermath
The Hazelwood principal's action drew the attention of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which published the censored articles, bringing them a much wider audience than the students at Hazelwood East High School. This pattern has repeated in subsequent censorship cases, as student editors go to local media not only to draw attention for the fact of the censorship, but to disseminate the censored material to a wider audience. [2][3][4][5]
Recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit decided, in Hosty v. Carter, 412 F.3d 731 (7th Cir. 2005) (en banc) that the supreme court's rationale in Hazelwood is applicable to colleges in the Seventh Circuit (i.e., colleges in Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin). This means that students at colleges in those states will need to prove their publications have been opened as a forum for student expression to be entitled to full First Amendment protection; the decision has no impact outside of the Seventh Circuit, and other federal circuits have decided cases in direct opposition to the result in Hosty. [6]
