The 25th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, which upheld school administrators’ exercise of editorial control over school-sponsored student expression, arrives on Jan. 13.
I have a new story in Education Week this week headlined “Landmark Student-Press Ruling Resonates After 25 Years.” It examines some of the issues surrounding the case, with a focus on how the justices handled their deliberations. The story draws on the papers of Justice Byron R. White, who wrote the 5-3 majority decision, as well as the papers of Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who wrote the dissent, and Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who took detailed notes of the court’s initial merits discussions in Hazelwood (as in other cases).
In an earlier story, I wrote about a September conference at the University of Missouri-Kansas City law school about landmark student speech cases in the Supreme Court, including the Hazelwood case. The case was also examined in November at a conference at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which I could not attend but is largely available in online video.
Later this month, American University’s Washington College of Law is planning one more conference on the Hazelwood anniversary, in conjunction with the Student Press Law Center. The date for that conference appears to have been set for Jan. 28.