Supreme Court declines to hear Indiana student's pro-life free speech case

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to take up the case of an Indiana high school student who wanted to post pro-life flyers in her school’s hallways.

At least one justice, however, thinks the Court's refusal to help is a mistake.

Key Takeaways:

• While dozens of other student clubs at Noblesville High School in Indiana were permitted to post flyers freely, administrators rejected the pro-life club’s flyers over the phrase, “Defund Planned Parenthood” printed on them.

• The case hinged on a 1988 Supreme Court decision that gave schools broad authority to restrict speech they could reasonably be seen as endorsing — a standard Justice Samuel Alito argues has never been consistently applied and is now overdue for correction.

• Students for Life of America responded to the ruling, writing: “Schools love to talk about diversity and inclusion. Until a student wants to advocate for preborn children.”

The Backstory:

During her freshman year in 2021, a Noblesville High School student, known in court papers as E.D., started a local chapter of Students for Life of America, and  attempted to hang flyers around campus advertising the club’s first meeting. The flyers, drawn from a national organization template, featured students holding signs reading “Defund Planned Parenthood” and “I Am the Pro-Life Generation.”

Administrators told her the flyers did not comply with the school’s requirement that wall postings remain politically neutral, and asked her to strip them down to basic meeting information. When her mother came to school to advocate for the flyers, the principal took that as outside interference and suspended the club. It was later reinstated, but by then, the family had decided to take the matter to court, contending the school had singled out their daughter’s club because of its pro-life message.

The Details:

The Supreme Court declined on June 15 to take up the case of the student, leaving intact lower court rulings that sided with the school. Both the federal district court and the Seventh Circuit found that the school’s content policy had been applied evenhandedly, and that no constitutional violation had taken place.

Justice Samuel Alito filed a dissent, arguing that the Supreme Court missed an opportunity to clean up decades of conflicting precedent on student speech rights.

The selective nature of the school’s enforcement did not go unnoticed. 

Students for Life of America responded to the ruling on X, writing: “Schools love to talk about diversity and inclusion. Until a student wants to advocate for preborn children. Justice Alito says SCOTUS should have heard the case. We completely agree.”

The Big Picture:

The case was never about just one student’s flyers.

Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the student alongside an Indianapolis law firm, argued that the legal standard governing student speech has become so “inconsistently” applied across the country that a student’s free speech rights now depend largely on geography.

At the center of the dispute is the Supreme Court’s 1988 Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier decision. In that case, the court ruled that schools may restrict speech in channels that could “reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school,” requiring only that the censorship be “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns” — a far lower bar than the standard set by the court’s earlier 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines decision, which held that schools could not restrict student expression unless it would “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.”

Justice Alito’s dissent argued that the gap between those two standards has created real confusion in the lower courts. “Since Hazelwood was decided, lower courts have struggled to ascertain its precise limits,” he wrote, “and in my view, clarification by this Court is in order.”

He went further, noting that the question at the heart of Hazelwood is closely tied to a broader distinction the Court has addressed repeatedly in the decades since: the line between government speech and private expression. 

“Courts must be very careful when a government claims that speech by one or more private speakers is actually government speech,” Alito wrote, “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.”

He concluded: “I would grant the petition to clarify the relationship between Hazelwood and our subsequent government-speech decisions. In an appropriate case, we should do so.”

The Bottom Line:

For now, the court’s refusal to act leaves in place a legal landscape where a pro-life student’s First Amendment rights depend less on the Constitution than on the circuit court that happens to cover her school.