R. George Wright (Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law) has posted An Institutional Purpose-Driven Approach to the Student Speech Cases on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Optimally promoting the recognized and legitimate basic purposes of public schools should be central to resolving typical student speech cases. Importantly, the schools, elected school boards, and other relevant elected officials, as distinct from the courts, are typically in the best position to develop a sense, whether articulated or not, of the most valued educational purposes at a given public school, along with their tradeoffs under particular circumstances. The courts should, however, also account for the cases in which a school is evidently not reasonably seeking to promote its own professed basic purposes. Ultimately, though, whether a fully justified judicial focus on a school’s promoting its own basic purposes would increase or decrease the scope of student speech rights, overall, cannot be determined in the abstract.
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