A New Jersey state law coming into effect today (Sept 1st) is considered the “toughest legislation against bullying in the nation”. It may, however, also prove to be dangerously overbroad and stifle student speech on a variety of topics. Called the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, the law was adopted in the aftermath of the suicide of a Rutgers University student [...]
David Hudson of the First Amendment Center is connecting the dots between the hypothetical case presented in the 2011 First Amendment Moot Court Competition (in which the College Of William and Mary Law School emerged victorious -- Go Tribe!) and the questions of freedom and accountability surrounding online speech facing administrators and communities around the country: Many questions remain in [...]
Schools that dish out draconian punishments to students who are mean to each other online (aka cyberbullying) risk running afoul of the First Amendment. Beverly Vista School, a K-8 school in the Beverly Hills Unified School District, learned this lesson via a November 2009 court ruling, where the federal district court for the Central District of California found that administrators [...]
It's five, and my Firefox windows is a few tabs away from crashing. Let's go through 'em, shall we? Bristol Palin is now a celebrity spokesperson for the teen pregnancy prevention run by the Candies Foundation. You may have heard of Candies, a tween/teen clothing store which markets the "floral lace thong" for 7-16 year olds. I'd add a link [...]
This week, Blogging Censorship will look at student speech: the new technologies that create more spaces for free expression, and growing concerns about cyber-bullying, internet filtering, and student online speech off-campus. Today, we’ll look at cyber-bullying, peer-to-peer. That is, students harassing other students online. A recent report from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University declared that [...]
JuicyCampus CEO Matt Ivester says it’s because of global economic downturn and not enough revenue. Seems likely. It also seems likely that the mounting debate on colleges whether or not to ban JuicyCampus from the college networks, and attorney general investigations into consumer fraud may have tipped the balance, so that a 2009 filled with litigation and banning on colleges didn’t [...]
The Star Tribune reports that students of Faribault High School, Minnesota, have moved their newspaper online after it was shut down by the school's superintendent. The superintendent shut down the paper after student editors refused to show him an article about an investigation into a middle school teacher before going to press. Now students will publish their newspaper Echo exclusively [...]
In November 2007 Katherine Evans, a senior at Pembroke Pines Charter High created a Facebook group criticizing her teacher. Three other students weighed in to comment: all supporting the teacher. Two days later Evans took down the page. Two months later, the school principal Peter Bayer told Evans that she would be suspended for three days for “bullying and cyberbullying [...]