The Supreme Court yesterday denied review in E.D. v. Noblesville School District, (Docket No. 25-906, certiorari denied 6/15/2026). At issue in the case is a high school's refusal to permit a student pro-life group to post flyers in the school because of the political content of the flyers. The dispute eventually led to the suspension of the pro-life group for several months. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the school's action.
Justice Alito filed an opinion dissenting from the denial of certiorari, saying in part:
Hazelwood ... concerned the regulation of “school-sponsored publications, theatrical productions, and other expressive activities that students, parents, and members of the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school.” ... When regulating the content of such activities, the Court held, a school need only meet the low bar of showing that the censorship is “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”
... “[C]ourts must be very careful when a government claims that speech by one or more private speakers is actually government speech,” because “it can be difficult to tell whether the government is using the doctrine ‘as a subterfuge for favoring certain private speakers over others based on viewpoint.’”...
I would grant the petition to clarify the relationship between Hazelwood and our subsequent government-speech decisions.
