Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Courts have often recognized that the first amendment rights of students in public schools are "are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings" -- Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser . Indeed, first amendment rights are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in a home environment; just try calling your Mom a “douchbag” and applying to a court afterwards on the grounds that your Mom, in punishing you, had violated your first amendment rights. One of the reasons schools may on occasion and with good reason abridge the first amendment rights of children is because, in the absence of parents, school official act in locus parenti , on behalf of parents. The locus is important in deciding just how far a school may go in trimming constitutional rights. The authority of a school to abridge a fundamental right in law is related to the place at which the offense occurs, because the authority of school administrators lapses when their ch...

The Avery Doninger case has now reached the courts, which means that it likely will be settled on legal grounds. But, as we all know, legal settlements are not always compatible with common sense. Common sense would have settled this issue long ago. Doninger is the student – now famous or infamous, depending on one’s point of view – who called the arrogant administrators in her school “douchbags,” not the politest of terms. But she had, as the lawyers might say, cause. The precipitating cause of Doninger’s outburst, in an e-mail message to her friends, was frustration; it happens to the best of us. Those details are described at considerable length, and in luminous prose, by Jon Schoenhorn in his brief on Doninger’s behalf and in a series of posts written by Andy Thibault , who maintains a site called, modestly enough, The Cool Justice Report, the nearest thing we have in the state to Nat Hentoff’s hard hitting reportage. Tibault is the natural born enemy of pomposity wherever it show...