The Supreme Court: The 1988 Hazelwood Case

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The Supreme Court did foreshadow its 1988 Hazelwood ruling. In 1985 it gave school officials broad discretion to search students and their belongings (New Jersey v. T.L.O), and the next year it upheld the suspension of a student whose speech before a school assembly was considered inappropriately vulgar (Bethel v. Fraser). Neither case focused on student rights; both stressed administrators' rights.
But the same July day that the Supreme Court decided Bethel, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Hazelwood (prior to its reaching the Supreme Court) that the principal unconstitutionally censored the stories written by Journalism II students for the newspaper. The circuit court's ruling was predictable and consistent with precedent. It cited two free speech safeguards which also are highlighted in a Student Press Law Center book (1985) assessing the then-current parameters of student press rights: 1) Publications that operate as forums for student expression cannot be censored merely because of dissatisfaction with the message; and 2) Censorship based on substantial disruption of the educational process requires evidence of such disruption.
The Supreme Court surprised many when it agreed to hear the Hazelwood case. It had ignored its "substantial …show more content…
Mark Goodman, Director of the Student Press Law Center, called the Hazelwood decision a "dramatic contrast to the decision of courts across the country over the last 15 years." (1988) Most important, from a legal perspective, is the virtual abandonment of Tinker and its progeny. After Hazelwood, students retain First Amendment rights in the schools, but the Tinker standard (especially the "substantial disruption" justification) applies only to non-school-sponsored speech--"personal expression that happens to occur on the school premises." Most other student expression is subject to a new standard the Court fashioned with sweeping language and broad implications (Eveslage,
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