How’s a private snap any different than a private letter?
I thought that letters had a copyright? The recipient has ownership but cannot publish. If they do copy and distribute (as a screenshot of a Snapchat message) does this not break copyright?
Edit: In New Zealand (where I am), an employer screenshooting and distributed an employee’s Facebook messages breached privacy laws. https://privacy.org.nz/tools/knowledge-base/view/366
In Levy's case, she made a public post (even if she didn't mean for it to be public). And to be clear, I'm not going to judge a 14 year old for doing things that I'd be annoyed with a 30 year old for doing. A kid got frustrated with her school and complained about it? Ooh, stop the presses and clutch some pearls! I have a much harder time sympathizing with people twice her age who complain publicly about how much their job sucks, then complain that their boss has relieved them of the burden of ongoing employment.
I don't think it's fair to call her action "making a public post" because she did not make it public. Someone else did.
I think she should be allowed to be a cheerleader even after complaining about her coach and school, as kids are wont to do. Now we'll find out if the courts see it the same way.
The school can certainly argue that all students have to meet the same requirements to participate, which would hinge on whether the student could reasonably anticipate the consequences here (an example where that isn't possible is if the school created and applied a policy for the incident).
My first comment is in response to the people inventing parallels that don't exist at all because schools and work places are very different things and wasn't an attempt to thoroughly examine the specifics. A finding that the existing obligations of the school do apply to this situation is irrelevant to at will employment.
That cannot possibly be true. Here is an example. Imagine if a school banned people from sports, because they expressed support for Obama or Trump.
Clearly that would be a government infringing on people's right to speech, as it is expressely political.
Or imagine that a school gave certain benefits, only to students, who publicly support a certain political candidate. If you don't support their choice of president, you lose privileges or benefits or get expelled.
Or, if we are truly talking about "any manner they see fit", an obvious counter example would be if they just banned women from playing sports.
> is about to open One Giant Can of Worms.
There is no can of worms being opened here. A school is a public institution. How speech laws apply to public institution is not some crazy out there idea. It is well established.
I am not sure why people are making out speech laws, which have a long history of how they apply to public institutions, as some sort of alien topic.
You wouldn't say that a school could expel people, for example, for this kind of speech, out of school. Why is it so crazy, for this to be applied to other activities?
Free speech laws apply differently in school. They're not exactly the same as other public institutions, as SCOTUS has ruled numerous times.
Bethel v. Fraser[0] is an example where the Court ruled pretty clearly that the school can go as far as to prohibit sexual innuendo, it doesn't even have to be obscene or vulgar.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethel_School_District_v._Fras...
I didn't say that they were exactly the same. Instead I am saying that there is not some "huge can of worms" that is opened on up this topic, if the supreme court rules in favor of the student in this case.
It is instead something that predictably might happen, and which will have predicable results that are in line with how things work in other examples.
So, in other words, the sky will not fall, and schools will not collapse under the weight of not being allowed to punish students for purely off campus speech.
I guess this case is about whether cheerleading falls into the former or latter category.
And really, any grown adult who says the same things about their employer that Levy did about her school should expect to find themselves unemployed as soon as word gets back. I don't mean that to diss Levy, who was a kid at the time, and besides, what kids don't privately rant to their friends about school? It's neither appropriate nor desirable for a school to say "you don't like it, then quit" to a child, whereas it's reasonable for most work settings to fire a disgruntled employee.