Judge: Student's online rants are protected speech

This was definitely a hard choice on where to place this but since it goes with both School & Facebook I figure this is a good board pick, if I'm wrong Mod's feel free to move it.

PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. (AP) -- A student who set up a Facebook page to complain about her teacher -- and was later suspended -- had every right to do so under the First Amendment, a federal magistrate has ruled. The ruling not only allows Katherine "Katie" Evans' suit against the principal to move forward, it could set a precedent in cases involving speech and social networking on the Internet, experts say.

hosted.ap.org...



Okay Brass tax time, a student back in 2007, decided she hated her teacher so she made a group on facebook about just how much she hated said teacher. While this may be a little bit immature, although I have made some pretty immature groups/pages in my day, it should be completely fine right? WRONG! Or at least thats what the school system said the Girl was kicked out of her AP classes and suspended for something completely unrelated to school.

Now for those of you that think us youngsters don't have any common sense, (I'm not exactly an old fogy), hopefully this will give you some hope in the future generations of the country, this girl here decided that this was un-constitutional, a breach of her free speech protected by the first amendment, (thank god civics is a required class), so she took the teacher, the school, and the school system to court, now the best part of all of this is that the judge ruled in her favor!

So we have a young-ish girl (She's 19 now apparently) taking on a school system that did something far outside of it's boundary's, I mean lets not be super conservative here or super liberal and not recognize that school shootings do happen, however what this girl did was non-threatening, and as such she shouldn't have had to deal with this in the first place but thank God she did.

So we have Precedent set up for future cases of cyber speech issues, a girl destroying an evil system (sort of), and a judge that has some common sense. I just love a happy ending.

So everyone how do you feel about all of this? I personally think that it's amazing and great that she won, even when I was in high school a few years back they went far outside their bounds in saying what kids could do.

Hallelujah, a victory for our children! And for free speech.Good for her, and I hope she wins a ton of money. I remember this case when it forst broke, I was livid.

It is refreshing to see the justice system work for a change.

good news. Always refreshing for the little person to win.

Hopefully this precedent is made known by more people/

Yeah it's always nice to see that the justice system isn't entirely broke/corrupt haha, and also nice that some precedent has finally been set I guarantee this case is gonna be cited a lot in the coming years.