Summary Of The Supreme Court Case Of Hazelwood V. Kuhlmeier

In Hazelwood East High School in St. Louis, Missouri Journalism Ⅱ students produced a newspaper. In which the principal deemed two pages infelicitous. In order to ensure the publication of the school paper on time, the principal deleted those two pages. Upon the delivery of the paper at the end of the year, Cathy Kuhlmeier filed a lawsuit in January 1984. The Supreme Court case of Hazelwood V. Kuhlmeier was a dispute involving the Journalism Ⅱ staff members in Hazelwood East High School in St. Louis versus the school board over the deletion of their hard worked two pages. They claimed that the decision of a principal to prohibit the publishing of certain articles in the school newspaper which he deems “inappropriate,” violates the student

The principal forced the students to remove the articles. With the printing deadline quickly approaching there was no time to edit the paper causing entire pages unobjectionable articles to be eliminated from the final edition. One student editor Cathy Kuhlmeier and reporters Leslie Smart and Leanne Tippett filed a lawsuit in January 1984 to the US District Court of the Eastern District of Missouri claiming their freedom of speech rights had been violated. The case began with the petitioners being the Hazelwood School District in St. Louis County, Missouri; various school officials such as Principal Robert Eugene Reynolds and Spectrum advisor Howard Emerson. The Respondents are three former Hazelwood East students who were the staff members the school newspaper. They profess that school officials violated their First Amendment rights by deleting two pages of articles from the May 13, 1983, issue of Spectrum. Moreover, once the case was brought into the US District Court of the Eastern District of Missouri they proclaimed that Principal Reynolds was

Kuhlmeier began a new trend in the rulings of First Amendment cases. During the 1960s an Arab student protested publications exploring social issues such as civil rights which were common and accepted. In 1969, the Supreme Court upheld that the freedom of expression of students is protected under the First Amendment. In the case of Tinker V. Des Moines, at least 125 additional court cases around the country were decided in favor of the students during this time period. Due to the legal precedent set by the Tinker case. The decision in Hazelwood V. Kuhlmeier as well as in Bethel school District V. Fraser in 1986, allowed school administers to reassert their authority in public schools (Raskin, Chap 7). This shift in decisions reflects a shift in leadership and culture during the 1980s. The conservative Ronald Reagan and appointed Justice William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court. The Chief Justice from 1986 to 2005, also a conservative. William Rehnquist seceded Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who although identified as a conservative, had made many liberal rulings on topics such as abortion and capital punishment including the Tinker case. The Supreme Court’s decision in Hazelwood V. Kuhlmeier struck a devastating blow to scholastic journalism, significantly cutting back on the First Amendment protections for public high school students. Student advocates condemned the Hazelwood decision for it would lead