Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District

Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, case in which on February 24, 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court established (7–2) the free speech and political rights of students in school settings. On the basis of the majority decision in Tinker v. Des Moines, school officials who wish to regulate student expression must be able to demonstrate that student expressive activities would result in material and substantial interference with the operations of the school or invade the rights of others. When school officials have specific facts that reasonably support predictions of disruption, they can regulate student expression, including banning specified activities.

Under U.S. law, schools are considered limited public spaces. As such, students have fewer free-speech rights in schools than they do on public streets. In schools, student free-speech rights must be balanced against the obligation of school officials to protect student safety and privacy and to deliver a quality education. In general, student free-speech rights extend only to expressions of a political, economic, or social nature that are not part of a school program. To this end, as the Supreme Court later ruled in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier (1988), school officials can regulate student writing in school newspapers with much less evidence of disruption than they can for student T-shirts or student discussions in the cafeteria. However, school officials can ban some forms of student expression of lewd or obscene natures, including student T-shirts, without any showing of potential disruption, since such speech has little or no educational value.

Background

On December 16, 1965, a 13-year-old 8th grader, Mary Beth Tinker, and a 16-year-old 11th grader, Christopher Eckhardt, wore black armbands to school in protest against the Vietnam War. Mary Beth’s older brother John, a 15-year-old 11th grader, wore an armband the following day. School officials suspended the students after they refused to remove their armbands. The protests followed a meeting at the Eckhardt house, where the parents of the students discussed ways to protest the Vietnam War.

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On learning of the plan to protest the war, the principals of the Des Moines schools met on December 14, two days before the protest, and created a policy specifically prohibiting the wearing of armbands. The new policy said that students who wore armbands in protest against the war would be subject to out-of-school suspension and could return only after agreeing not to wear the armbands. The three students were suspended from school and did not return until after New Year’s Day. The parents of the students filed suit in a federal trial court in Iowa, seeking an injunction against the school board to prevent officials from disciplining the students.

The petitioners argued that wearing the armbands in school was within the students’ constitutional rights to free speech. The trial court disagreed and dismissed the case, ruling that the board operated within its rights in suspending the students, although there was no finding that their actions created a substantial disruption of school activities. On further review, the Eighth Circuit affirmed without opinion in 1967. The petition for certiorari was granted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968.

Majority opinion

The question presented to the U.S. Supreme Court was whether the First and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution allowed school officials to prohibit students from wearing symbols of political expression in school when the symbols are not “disruptive of school discipline or decorum.” The petitioners argued that the students’ wearing of the armbands was protected by the free-speech clause of the First Amendment and the due-process and equal-protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. The respondents countered that officials were within their rights to regulate student expression in the interest of maintaining an educational environment free from the disruption that the administration anticipated.

Justice Abe Fortas, writing the majority opinion, penned the often-quoted line that neither teachers nor students “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Fortas reasoned that the wearing of armbands was akin to “pure speech” and was therefore protected by the U.S. Constitution. He contrasted the policy regulating armbands to other policies, such as dress codes, which previous court decisions upheld as constitutional. The difference, Fortas maintained, was in the intention of the message and the motivation of the administration in barring the expression. Fortas wrote that “undifferentiated fear” of disturbance was not enough to ban student expression. Fortas added that in seeking to limit student expression when such expression would not interfere with a school’s expected discipline, prohibiting student expression could not be sustained. The majority opinion was joined in full by Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justices William Brennan, William O. Douglas, and Thurgood Marshall.

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While agreeing in principle with the majority opinion, Justice Potter Stewart, in his concurrence, qualified his agreement by noting his apprehension at the concept that First Amendment rights of children are “co-extensive” with those of adults. Stewart cautioned that in some cases it is permissible to limit the rights of children. Justice Byron R. White joined with the court’s decision, though he noted his different interpretation of Burnside v. Byars (a case cited by the majority as a legal precedent) and remarked that the court continues to differentiate between “communicating by words” and “communicating by acts.”

Dissenting opinion

The dissenting opinions of Justice Hugo Black and Justice John Marshall Harlan focused on the need for school officials to establish discipline and an educational environment free from distracting and emotionally charged disruptions. Justice Black argued at length for the school, noting that the disruptions anticipated by the administration actually occurred and that the armbands took students’ minds off their schoolwork. In a statement about the consequences of the court’s decision, Justice Black dramatically warned:

One does not need to be a prophet or the son of a prophet to know that after the Court’s holding today some students in Iowa schools and indeed in all schools will be ready, able, and willing to defy their teachers on practically all orders.

In sum, Tinker v. Des Moines stands out as the first and, according to many, the most-important case dealing with the free-speech rights of students in American public schools.