Article from Fox News by Perry Chiaramonte.
A Los Angeles college student who sued his school for allegedly curbing his right to free speech after it prevented him from passing out copies of the U.S. Constitution was vindicated in court this week.
The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD), which represents nine schools, including Pierce College, agreed on Wednesday to settle a lawsuit filed against them last year by student Kevin Shaw after he was barred from passing out copies of the document because he wasn’t in the school’s designated “free speech zone,” which measured 616 square feet or about the size of three parking spaces.
As a part of the settlement, the tiny area marked for students to exercise their first amendment rights will be abandoned altogether, revoking a district-wide policy that declared all property on the district’s nine campuses to be “non-public forums” with speech restrictions. As part of the settlement, LACCD will pay Shaw’s $225,000 in attorney fees.
“Though it was not without its difficulties, this experience has left me optimistic about the guiding principles of my country,” said Shaw in a statement provided to Fox News. “Folks of all political dispositions rallied behind this case to declare in no uncertain terms: freedom of speech is essential to the educational process.”
Read the entire article at Fox News.
Image Credit: By St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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Agree 1000%…….. US of A is a free speech zone!!
Only up to a point, then it’s not. Because of the previous administration, all this free speech has gotten out of hand…i.e. fake news is at it’s highest, there is no journalistic ethics anymore which is sad. It will eventually turn on the media, you watch.
That totalitarians were able to impose something like this on a College campus in this Country in the first place, is very disturbing. Those responsible should have been brought up on Civil Rights Violations and jailed. If we don’t start getting tough on this kind of thing, we’re going to lose this once great Country.