Posted on 03/04/2008 12:17:03 PM PST by Tank-FL
SAN FRANCISCO, March 4, 2008—Yesterday, San Francisco State University (SFSU) settled a lawsuit challenging its speech codes by agreeing to modify several unconstitutional policies to make them consistent with the First Amendment. The settlement also requires SFSU to pay damages to members of the university's College Republicans as well as to pay the College Republicans' attorney fees. The lawsuit—part of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's (FIRE's) Speech Codes Litigation Project—was filed in July 2007 by attorneys from the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF).
"Unconstitutional speech codes have been dealt yet another blow," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "This lawsuit and settlement send a message to university administrators everywhere that there are real consequences for violating students' rights."
SFSU's speech codes had banned expression clearly protected by the United States Constitution. For example, the college's sexual harassment policy defined sexual harassment as "one person's distortion of a university relationship by unwelcome conduct which emphasizes another person's sexuality." A policy regulating student organizations had banned any conduct "inconsistent with SF State goals, principles, and policies." In addition, the SFSU College Republicans was unconstitutionally targeted for the content of the group's expression in 2006.
In November 2007, U.S. Magistrate Judge Wayne Brazil issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting SFSU and the California State University (CSU) System as a whole from enforcing several of the policies challenged in the lawsuit. Yesterday's settlement permanently revises those policies and affects the more than 400,000 students enrolled in the CSU System
(Excerpt) Read more at thefire.org ...
Great precedent!
Now if we want to keep it - and spread it, we damn well better be sure hitlery or "O" don't get in to appoint even one justice to the SCOTUS or start filling all those vacant federal judge-ships they refuse to now, with their activist judges...or this will reverse so quick we'll wonder if it ever happened.
We should donate to this group... this is worthy work.
I still say FIRE is playing too nice. There were federal civil rights law violations here and getting a Dean or two sent to prison would almost surely make it unnecessary to go through this again at another college, and another, and another....
ADF is a great organization. Well worth supporting, as I do.
Yay for the College Reeps!
Okay - I'm at a lost as to what the heck this actually means!
ping
Super news! FIRE is doing great work here but as they state, suppression of free speech by universities & colleges is the norm not the exception.
I want to think they get to the point where the courts start levying heavy, punitive fines against these institutions but that only hurts the consumer. Perhaps the courts could somehow publicly humiliate the promulgators of these bad speech codes by identifying and unmasking them from their bureaucratic anonymity?
I wonder if you would be so kind as to cite even a single example from the federal system, or even from any state, where someone functioning in a governmental or quasi-governmental capacity has actually been found guilty of any crime involving "civil rights violations" and been "sent to prison."
I’m going to step out on a limb here and site the Rodney King trial federal trial. The officers got nailed on hate-crimes associated with violating his civil rights as I recall. Someone else care to correct me? This is completely from memory.
Here you go.
The relevant paragraph is towards the bottom and concerns one Arthur Sease and his co-conspirators.
Yes, now that you’ve been so gracious to point it out, I can certainly see the close correspondence between the crimes committed in your link and the heinous crimes committed by those evil deans. I say prison is much too good for those deans, don’t you? Too bad there still remains the concept of the punishment fitting the crime, not to mention that constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But not to fret, I’m sure you’ll come up with something.
Dean, are you?
In other words, the laudable end of discouraging the trampling of our First Amendment freedoms does not justify your grotesque means. Perhaps you'd like to imprison me for daring to disagree with you.
You might wish to read my post #13 on this thread.
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