Saturday, May 30, 2009



Sotomayor rules against free speech for blogger

We read:
"President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill a Supreme Court vacancy has yet another tie to Connecticut. She sided against a student in the infamous “douche bag” case, and that has upset some free-speech advocates.

In August 2007, Judge Sonia Sotomayor sat on a panel that ruled against an appeal in Doninger v. Niehoff. Avery Doninger was disqualified from running for school government at Lewis S. Mills High School in Burlington after she posted something on her blog, referring to the superintendent and other officials as "douche bags" because they canceled a battle of the bands she had helped to organize.

The case went to court and in March 2008, Sotomayor was on a panel that heard Doninger’s mother’s appeal alleging her daughter’s free speech and other rights were violated. Her mother wanted to prevent the school from barring her daughter from running. Sotomayor joined two other judges from the 2nd Circuit in ruling that the student’s off-campus blog remarks created a “foreseeable risk of substantial disruption” at the student’s high school and that the teenager was not entitled to a preliminary injunction reversing a disciplinary action against her

The ruling in this case has come under heavy criticism from some civil libertarians. Some say this case presents a solid rationale for rejecting Judge Sonia Sotomayor of New York’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals to fill the seat of retiring Justice David Souter.

“The continual expansion of the authority of school officials over student speech teaches a foul lesson to these future citizens,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, told the New Britain Herald. “I would prefer some obnoxious speech [rather] than teaching students that they must please government officials if they want special benefits or opportunities.”

Source

So she only upholds free speech when it suits her.

3 comments:

Doug said...

This case doesn't seem that different from the above NYC PD case in which she argued the other way.

Anonymous said...

“foreseeable risk of substantial disruption”?

So she ruled on what "might happen" in the future? Perhaps she will be the first all-knowing, all-seeing, member of the Supremes.

She will be president Obummer's first appointment to the SCOTUS, with more to follow. And their primary function will be to re-engineer our society until we fit the image of what he, and other members of the extreme left, see as a perfect international America. One where any form of dissent is not allowed unless first pre-approved by the left. And you want to know why so many real Americans are buying guns?

Robert said...

An arbitrary racist for the Supreme Court. Just what we don't need...