Supreme Court Leaves Michigan School’s ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ Ruling in Place
The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by two Michigan middle school students disciplined for wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts. The decision leaves…
A school sweatshirt dispute put student speech rights before the Supreme Court. On Monday, the justices declined to hear an appeal from two Michigan middle school students who were ordered to remove sweatshirts bearing “Let’s Go Brandon,” leaving a lower court decision in favor of their school district intact.
The decision means the court will not clarify how far schools may go in restricting potentially offensive messages in classrooms. The dispute arose at Tri County Middle School, where a teacher and an assistant principal separately asked the brothers to take off the sweatshirts.
The students, identified by their initials in court papers, were in eighth and sixth grade at the time. Their family sued in 2023, alleging violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
The phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” became right-wing code for “F**k Joe Biden.” It originated at a NASCAR race in 2021, when a crowd chanted the vulgar phrase and a reporter interviewing driver Brandon Brown suggested the spectators were cheering for him instead.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to take the case leaves the divided 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in place. The ruling favored the school district, which argued that a message can carry an offensive meaning even when its wording appears sanitized.
Supreme Court avoids a ruling on coded speech
The case could have further defined student free-speech rights, nearly six decades after the Supreme Court ruled that students do not lose First Amendment protections when they enter school. In Tinker v. Des Moines, the court allowed students to wear black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War.
That protection has limits. Schools may restrict speech that disrupts the classroom, and a 1986 Supreme Court precedent permits schools to prohibit vulgar or offensive language, depending on the context. The sweatshirt dispute raised the question of whether a coded phrase can fall within that exception.
The school district, represented by veteran Supreme Court lawyer Lisa Blatt, used examples in its brief to argue that meaning can be conveyed through innuendo and double meanings. One example was a T-shirt depicting President Donald Trump clutching cats with the words “And that’s how you GRAB EM!” The brief linked the image to the “Access Hollywood tape,” which captured Trump in 2005 speaking about groping and kissing women.
The district also cited the number 69 as an example of language whose meaning can change with context. “Although on its face it is just a number innocently falling between 68 and 70, many understand it to refer to a sexual position,” it told the Supreme Court. The brief added: “Respondents apologize for the use of offensive language and images in this brief.”
For schools, the unresolved question has practical consequences: administrators must judge not only the words printed on clothing but also what those words communicate in a particular setting. The court’s decision leaves the lower court’s ruling as the outcome in this dispute, without setting a new nationwide standard for coded student expression.
The Supreme Court has addressed related questions about student speech outside school. Five years ago, it ruled in favor of a former high school cheerleader who argued that her public school could not punish her for a profanity-laced Snapchat caption posted off campus.
That Pennsylvania case drew close attention because it involved how schools should balance students’ speech rights against concerns about off-campus and online messages that could disrupt a school’s mission, amount to bullying or constitute threats. Justice Stephen Breyer, who has since retired, wrote that dismissing a student’s words as unworthy of strong First Amendment protection could endanger broader protections. “But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary,” he wrote.
The court also rejected an appeal from Dylann Roof, who was convicted of racially motivated hate crimes resulting in death for killing nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof was sentenced to death.
Source: cnn.com
