Education Cases One Facet of Stevens’ High Court Legacy

To the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1986 case, a high school student who had delivered a sexual-innuendo-filled speech to a school assembly was a “confused boy” guilty of “offensive” and “insulting” behavior. The court upheld a three-day suspension and his removal from the list of potential commencement speakers.

But to Justice John Paul Stevens—who announced this month that he would retire in June, after more than 34 years on the high court—student Matthew N. Fraser “was an outstanding young man with a fine academic record,” as the justice put it in his dissent in Bethel v. Fraser .

“The fact that he was chosen by the student body to speak at the school’s commencement exercises demonstrates that he was respected by his peers,” Justice Stevens wrote, and it “indicates that he was probably in a better position to determine whether an audience composed of 600 of his contemporaries would be offended by the use of … a sexual metaphor than is a group of judges who are at least two generations and 3,000 miles away from the...