Talk:Dean v. Utica Community Schools

Substantive corrections
The understanding of forum analysis articulated in the earlier versions of this article didn't quite capture what the decision was saying about limited public fora. First, a limited public forum isn't a "hybrid" of public and non-public; it's the name for a designated public forum limited by either subject matter or audience. Second--and this is really crucial to understand--the government can't modify the content in a limited public forum "to serve a compelling government interest," it can limit the scope of the content, but not modify content within that scope. See page 13 of the decision. ("[T]he government may impose only reasonable time, place, and manner regulations, and content-based regulations that are narrowly drawn to effectuate a compelling state interest.")

This is a drastic, night-and-day difference. The entire purpose of having limited public forum status is so the government (in this case, the school) can't step in and change what's written. The government gets immunity from liability for what's published, and in turn, doesn't touch anything that falls within the scope of the forum. So while the government can create a forum with a limited scope (e.g., a publication for the discussion of quantum theory), it can't censor articles that fall within the scope (e.g., an article that posits quantum theory is fact because Lucky the Leprechaun appeared in a dream and said so).

A student newspaper is inherently a limited public forum because the access to its pages are limited by the student editors. So calling this a limited public forum has nothing to do with the scope of the content--which is, unless specified at the creation of the forum, unlimited--and everything to do with limiting who has a right to speak in the newspaper. To put it another way, this isn't a content-limited public forum, but an audience-limited public forum.

Finally, I removed the link to the ASBJ article and replaced it with a link to the Dean decision. That article has (1) nothing whatsoever to do with Dean, (2) nothing whatsoever to do with forum status, and (3) nothing whatsoever to do with student newspapers. It's just speaking about a totally unrelated aspect of the Hazelwood decision (in-class activity). Junkmale 20:48, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Nice article; needs one thing...
This good, well-written, and informative article. It does need one improvement (but it's an easy one). The first sentence or paragraph of an article should set out the context and super-briefly summarise the article. That way someone who ended up here by accident will know if this is or isn't what they were looking for without having to read too much. So for this I'd propose something like:


 * Dean v. Utica Community Schools (345 F.Supp.2d 799 [E.D. Mich. 2004]) is a U.S. legal case which clarified the limits placed on censorship of a school newspaper by students' rights under the First Amendment.

That're entirely a suggestion, as I don't know enough about the subject to actually write the introductory sentence - but hopefully you'll see what I mean and write something better that mine :) --  01:55, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * That's a great suggestion. I'm currently taking a high school journalism class (hence the article's topic) and probably should have realized the need for such an informative lead in the first place.  -- Rvmiller89 03:01, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I approve entirely of your summary. The hardest thing about writing, here as elsewhere, is fitting into the "house style".  You're off to a great start. --  03:10, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Another thing
This article doesn't actually tell you anything about the conclusions drawn by Dean's article. Please could someone add this, as I'd really like to know. Localperson118 17:01, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Dean's article wasn't conclusory, it was a news article on the fact of the lawsuit. Junkmale 22:02, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

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