Pennsylvania courts rule on students' freedom of speech on Web

The state of Pennsylvania's U.S. Circuit Court came to two different conclusions in two cases Thursday, but both involved suspending students for MySpace use.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court was looking at two cases concerning the rights of students and free speech, and the power schools can exert for discipline when students exercise their freedom of speech outside school. Mercer County ruled in a 2-1 decision that a high school cannot reach into a family's home or monitor the Internet to police the speech of their students. In a second case, in Schuylkill County, another three-judge panel ruled it was okay for a school to suspend a teen when she posted a sexually explicit parody of her principal on a fake MySpace page. The court did limit the reach of the school saying they could only reach into the home or pull from the Internet if the school could expect the posting to be a disruption. There have been similar cases of free-speech and freedom of expression surfacing throughout the U.S., and as in Pennsylvania, the rulings have been mixed.