The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a Pennsylvania public school wrongly suspended a cheerleader for a social media post she made after failing to qualify for varsity.
The court voted eight to one in favor of Brandi Levy, who was a high school freshman when she expressed her disappointment on Snapchat at not being on the varsity cheerleading squad, with a series of swear words and a raised middle finger. .
Levy, from Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, was not in school when she took up her post, but she was suspended from cheerleading activities for a year anyway. In an opinion by Judge Stephen Breyer, the superior court ruled that the suspension violated Levy’s First Amendment rights.
The case stemmed from Levy’s posts, one of which featured her and a friend with a raised middle finger and repeated use of a vulgarity to complain that she had been left out of the varsity cheerleading squad.
“F ——— school f ——— softball f ——— joy f ——— everything,” he wrote near the end of his freshman year. Levy, now 18, recently finished his freshman year of college.
The young woman’s parents filed a federal lawsuit after the cheerleading coach suspended her from the junior varsity team for a year. The lower courts ruled in favor of Levy and she was reinstated.
The school district appealed to the Supreme Court after the broad appeal ruling that said off-campus student speech was beyond the schools’ punitive authority.
The dispute is the latest in a series of cases that began with Tinker v. Des Moines, the Vietnam-era case of a high school in Des Moines, Iowa, which suspended students who wore armbands to protest the war. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court sided with students, declaring that students do not “give up their constitutional rights to free speech at the school gate.”
The court also held at the time that schools retained the authority to restrict speech that would disrupt the school environment.
Breyer wrote that Levy’s case seemed less serious than that of his Vietnam-era predecessor.
“It might be tempting to dismiss BL’s words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections discussed here. But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous to preserve the necessary, ”she wrote, using Levy’s initials because that was how she was identified in the original lawsuit. Levy has given numerous interviews allowing his name to be used.
Disagreeing, Judge Clarence Thomas wrote that he would have upheld Levy’s suspension.
– .
