If Google results are any indication, there are a lot of folks out there calling their teachers “douchebags” on LiveJournal. If any of them live in Connecticut, though, they may want to consider taking those journals private in light of a federal court ruling issued earlier this month, which upheld the right of public school administrators to discipline a student for speech on her personal blog.

Ars first covered the case of Avery Doninger—at the time a recent graduate of Lewis S. Mills High School—this past summer. Following a dust-up with school administrators about the possible cancellation of a repeatedly-postponed student concert, Doninger fumed on her LiveJournal about the “douchebags in central office” and urged her fellow students to call or e-mail said douchebags in order to express their displeasure. (The post asserted that the concert had, in fact, been canceled, though school officials say Doninger was wrong about this.) When the school retaliated by barring Doninger from running for reelection to her seat on the student council, Doninger sought to force a rerun, claiming violation of her First Amendment rights. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declined to do so, however, noting that schools enjoy greater discretion in limiting participation in extracurricular activities than in (say) inflicting punishments like expulsion, and ruling that the post was subject to school authority because it had “a reasonably foreseeable risk [of coming] to the attention of school authorities.”

Click here to read the rest of this article

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica – Front page content