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Evans v. Selma Union High School District of Fresno County - Religion
The California State Supreme Court held that the King James version of the Bible was not a "publication of a sectarian, partisan, or denominational character" that a State statute required a public high school library to exclude from its collections. The "fact that the King James version is commonly used by Protestant Churches and not by Catholics" does not "make its character sectarian," the court stated -
Near v. Minnesota - Press
In this case, the Supreme Court interpreted the First and Fourteenth Amendments to forbid "previous restraints" upon publication of a newspaper. "Previous restraints"--or in current terminology, "prior restraints--suppress the freedom of the press to publish without obstruction, and recognize that lawsuits or prosecutions for libel are "subsequent punishments." -
Thornhill v. Alabama - Petition
The Supreme Court held that orderly union picketing that informs the public of the issues protected by the constiututional freedom of speech and of the press and the right to petiition can not be prosecuted under state loitering and picketing laws. -
Rosenberg v. Board of Education of City of New York - Press
After considering the charge that Oliver Twist and the Merchant of Venice are "objectionable because they tend to engender hatred of the Jew as a person and as a race," the Supreme Court, Kings County, New York, decided that these two works cannot be banned from the New York City schools, libraries, or classrooms, declaring that the Board of Education "acted in good faith without malice or prejudice and in the best interests of the school system entrusted to their care and control, and, therefor -
United States v. Harriss - Petition
The Supreme Court upheld the authority of congress to require certain lobbyists to register. -
Edwards v. South Carolina - Assembly
A group of 187 African Americans led a march on South Carolina State capitol to protest against policies of segregation in their state. The arrests and convictions violated the rights of the marchers. -
Brown v. Louisiana - Petition and Assembly
The Supreme court reversed the convictions of five black individuals who participated in an orderly and peaceful sit in at a local branch library to protest segregation at the library. The court protected their right of petition and freedom of assembly -
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District - Speech
In this seminal case considering the First Amendment rights of students ( John F. Tinker, Christopher Eckhardt, and Mary Beth Tinker) who were expelled after they wore black armbands to school in symbolic protest of the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court held that students "do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate" and that the First Amendment protects public school students' rights to express political and social views. -
Brandenburg v. Ohio - Press
The Supreme Court established the modern version of the "clear and present danger" doctrine, holding that states only could restrict speech that "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and is likely to incite or produce such action." -
Todd v. Rochester Community schools - Press
In deciding that Slaughterhouse-Five could not be banned from the libraries and classrooms of the Michigan schools, the Court of Appeals of Michigan declared: "Vonnegut's literary dwellings on war, religion, death, Christ, God, government, politics, and any other subject should be as welcome in the public schools of this state as those of Machiavelli, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Melville, Lenin, Joseph McCarthy, or Walt Disney. The students of Michigan are free to make of Slaughterhouse-Five what they -
Minarcini v. Strongsville (Ohio) City School District - Press
The Strongsville City Board of Education rejected faculty recommendations to purchase Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and ordered the removal of Catch-22 and Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle from the library. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled against the School Board, upholding the students' First Amendment right to receive information and the librarian's right to disseminate it. "The removal of books from a school library is a much more serio -
Brown v. Glines - Petition
The high court upheld the authority of military base commanders to require approval before military personnel can send a petition to members of congress. -
Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile (Ala.) County - Press
Parents and other citizens brought a lawsuit against the school board, alleging that the school system was teaching the tenets of an anti-religious religion called "secular humanism." The complainants asked that forty-four different elementary through high school level textbooks be removed from the curriculum. After an initial ruling in a federal district court in favor of the plaintiffs -
Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education - Religion
Parents and students brought this action challenging the mandatory use of certain textbooks on the ground that the texts promoted values offensive to their religious beliefs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected the plaintiffs' claim, finding that the Constitution does not require school curricula to be revised substantially in order to accommodate religious beliefs. -
Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School Dist - Assembly
The Court held that a school district that opened its classrooms after hours to a range of groups for social, civic, and recreational purposes, including films and lectures about a range of issues such as family values and child-rearing, could not deny access to a religious organization to discuss the same, permissible issues from a religious point of view. Whether or not the classrooms were public fora, the school district could not deny use based on the speaker's point of view on an otherwise
