Hudson High School v. Bowler [1]

In the fall of 2004, two students at Hudson High School ("HHS") in Hudson, Massachusetts formed a Conservative Club in an effort to provide a forum for pro-conservative views on campus. The HHS Conservative Club was affiliated with a national organization, the High School Conservative Clubs of America, whose slogan is "Protecting American Freedom, Faith, and Morality." Among other things, the group endorses Second Amendment rights, the "restoration" of Christian values to schools and government, and the closing of the nation's borders to all immigrants; the group is opposed to gay marriage, affirmative action, and abortion.

When the HHS Conservative Club put up posters advertising its first organizational meeting, included on these posters was a link to the club's national organization's website [2]. At the time this case arose, this website contained a banner entitled "Islam: A Religion of Peace?" Underneath the banner was a still shot from a video depicting a beheading (the still depicted the scene immediately before the actual beheading) as well as a link to five beheading videos. The links to these videos were accompanied by a warning that the videos were extremely graphic but that the group feels "it is necessary to provide them so you can see the true doctrines of Islam put into action."

Alerted to the HSCCA website by a faculty member, the HHS Technology Director reviewed it and decided to block access to it from all the school computers. When she told the assistant principal about the website, he ordered all of the group's posters removed. The school principal later permitted the group to put up posters as long as the HSCCA website was blacked out. The school officials contend that the graphic content available on the HSCCA website would disturb some of the students at the school, some of whom were under 12, and that the posters threatened to disrupt the operation of the school by requiring teachers to take time away from their lessons to discuss the videos with psychologically scarred students. The leaders of the HHS Conservative Group sued the school district as well as school administrators for violating their First Amendment rights; the defendants later moved for summary judgment to dismiss the plaintiffs' claims.

On October 4, 2007, the Massachusetts district court largely rejected the defendants' motion for summary judgment. In the first part of the court's opinion [3], U.S. District Court Judge Saris noted how far removed the posters were from actually presenting violent images:

To access the videos, a student would need (1) to view the posters and then, later, (2) access the website (and he could not do so at school because the website was blocked by the time the posters were removed), (3) discover the beheading videos among the other content, (4) navigate past an express warning, and (5) affirmatively click a link to the videos. There is no allegation that plaintiffs were publicizing the graphic content of the website. Thus, students at HHS were not a "captive audience" for the videos; rather, the videos were only available to the students, outside of school, as a matter of conscious choice.

The court also noted that the Technology Director's decision to block the website was akin to censoring a book in the school's library and might also be a separate constitutional violation; however, the plaintiffs in this case had not made that argument.

The district court then went on to grant the individual school officials qualified immunity, explaining that "[t]he First Amendment jurisprudence governing a school's regulation of student access to violent speech on the internet with the benign intent to protect students from images which may be upsetting and psychologically damaging is not settled . . . ." The court confused the issue of whether blocking access to the HSCCA website on its computers would be constitutional-certainly an open issue-with the issue of whether it was constitutional to force the group to eliminate any reference to the website on its posters.

Update:

April 2008 - The parties settled the case and filed a stipulation of dismissal [4].