The First Amendment in Public Schools

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In 1969 the United States Supreme Court decided Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, a landmark case in student speech that boldly proclaimed that students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. In the intervening years, the Court reshaped Tinker s pronouncement by carving out exceptions to it. Rendered in 1986, Bethel v. School District No. 403 v. Fraser allows public schools to regulate offensively lewd and indecent speech. Two years later the Court ruled on Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, which authorizes reasonable censorship of the school sponsored speech of students. In 2007 the Court decided Morse v. Frederick, an opinion that provides yet another arguably narrow exception to allow schools to quiet student speech that promotes illegal drug use.
The purpose of this article is to provide for a Korean audience a brief introduction and analysis of the First Amendment rights of public school students in the United States. Part II discusses Tinker and the golden age of student speech. Part III introduces the evolution of First Amendment rights of students from 1969 to 1988. Part IV details Morse, a relatively recent Supreme Court opinion on student speech.
The article concludes that, while Tinker certainly unlocked the schoolhouse gate for First Amendment freedoms, it did not, and ultimately should not, remove the gate altogether to liberalize the rights of public school students so as to eliminate any distinction between speech within the schoolhouse from speech outside of it.