When Joseph Frederick unfurled his homemade, 14-foot banner proclaiming ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus’ during an Olympic torch relay in Juneau, Alaska, in 2002, he started down a path paved with lively discussions of schools’ control on student speech that led all the way to the Supreme Court March 19, 2007.Frederick, then a high-school senior, was off school property when he hoisted the banner but was suspended for violating the school’s policy of promoting illegal substances at a school-sanctioned event.’In Alaska, the issue of drug possession is an active political question,’ said Michael Macleod-Ball, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska. ‘But what really matters here are students’ speech rights. They have as much free speech rights as non-students.’A March ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Frederick, claiming Juneau-Douglas High School principal Deborah Morse violated Frederick’s freedom of speech.Morse is being represented by Kenneth Starr, the former special prosecutor who investigated President Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. Starr, of the Los Angeles-based firm Kirkland & Ellis, took the case pro bono.’What makes this case legally complex is the unusual mix of legal rights and social values at stake, and the challenging set of facts,’ said Mark Obbie, director of the Carnegie legal reporting program at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. ‘We have a collision of student speech, school discipline, drug control and religion, and those principles are mixed into a factual scenario that’s ready made for law school hypotheticals for generations to come.’ Issues of free speech in high schools were first considered by the Supreme Court in Tinker v. Des Moines. The 1969 decision, which concerned students who were suspended for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, ruled that a student’s right to free expression should not be limited while in school or on school grounds.Joel Kaplan, associate dean of graduate programs at Newhouse, said in civics classes, high school students are taught that freedom of expression is the foundation upon which political freedom stands.’When someone holds up a sign that says, ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus,’ what a perfect opportunity to have a discussion about why it’s not a good idea to hold that sign – or maybe, why it is,’ he said. ‘That’s why the First Amendment is the bulwark of our society.’The Bush administration has also involved itself in the case, arguing that public schools do not have to tolerate a message inconsistent with their educational mission. But this argument was rebuffed by one of the court’s more conservative justices, Antonin Scalia. He told the administration’s lawyer that he found the school principal Morse’s argument, ‘very, very disturbing,’ on the grounds that schools could choose to define their educational mission so broadly as to suppress political speech and speech expressing fundamental student values, according to the Associated Press. Conservative groups often allied with the administration are backing Frederick out of concern that a ruling for Morse would let schools clamp down on religious expression, including speech that might oppose homosexuality or abortion.’LGBT folks and members of the religious right are both filing briefs on behalf of Frederick,’ said Macleod-Ball, executive director of the ACLU in Alaska. ‘Conservatives realize the Bush administration isn’t going to be around forever, and they’re afraid a liberal group down the road could try and take away their rights to free speech. Our position is that politics doesn’t matter in this case.’ The American Center for Law and Justice, founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson, warned in a brief filed by its chief counsel Jay Alan Sekulow that public schools ‘face a constant temptation to impose a suffocating blanket of political correctness upon the educational atmosphere.’ ‘Because these students were participating in a public event, outside of school, they seem to be in the right,’ said Hanna Kinne, a member of the American Constitution Society at SU. ‘Additionally, the students’ lawyer tried to offer a deal to the school, that instead of suing them for monetary damages, they would agree to drop the suit if the school brought in a panel to discuss free speech. The school stubbornly and foolishly denied that deal, in my opinion.’ The court is expected to rule on the case in June.’What a First Amendment advocate might find chilling in all of this is the notion that certain ideas and speech are supposedly disruptive to education,’ Obbie said. ‘Some of us think they’re the whole point of an education.’