Tinker must be understood to bar purposeful viewpoint discrimination, but the conclusion that a school speech restriction constitutes purposeful viewpoint discrimination will come at the end rather than at the beginning of constitutional analysis. A school will never announce that it has restricted ...
Tinker v. Des Moines tested the extent of the First Amendment in 1969 due to students wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. The United States had been involved in Vietnam since the 1950’s and the First Indochina War. After the French left, the US occupied Vietnam in an ...
He argued that the conduct in question had been disruptive and that school officials had the right to control their classrooms. Black stated that it was a "myth to say that any person has a constitutional right to say what he pleases, where he pleases, and when he pleases." Teachers were...
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 the...