Settle v. Dickson County School Board’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

11 federal appellate · 1 district · 1 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 32 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Where learning is the focus, as in the classroom, student speech may be even more circumscribed than in the school newspaper or other open forum. So long as the teacher limits speech or grades speech in the classroom in the name of learning and not as a pretext for punishing the student for her race, gender, economic class, religion or political persuasion, the federal courts should not interfere. Like judges, teachers should not punish or reward people on the basis of inadmissible factors — race, religion, gender, political ideology — but teachers, like judges, must daily decide which arguments are relevant, which computations are correct, which analogies are good or bad, and when it is time to stop writing or talking. Grades mtist be given by teachers in the classroom, just as cases are decided in the courtroom; and to this end teachers, like judges, must direct the content of speech. Teachers may frequently make mistakes in grading and otherwise, just as we do sometimes in deciding cases, but it is the essence of the teacher’s responsibility in the classroom to draw lines and make distinctions — in a word to encourage speech germane to the topic at hand and discourage speech unlikely to shed light on the subject. Teachers therefore must be given broad discretion to give grades and conduct class discussion based on the content of speech.... It is not for us to overrule the teacher’s view that the student should learn to write research papers by beginning with a topic other ”

   6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Axson-Flynn v. Johnson · Pompeo v. Board of Regents of University of New Mexico

2. “A research paper is not an expression of opinion, and the restriction of choice of topic is not readily analogous to the kind of pure expression of student opinion, that happened to take place in the classroom, that the Supreme Court addressed [in Tinker ]. The bottom line is that when a teacher makes an assignment even if she does it poorly, the student has no constitutional right to do something other than that assignment and receive credit for it. It is not necessary to try to cram this situation into the framework of constitutional precedent, because there is no constitutional question.”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Axson-Flynn v. Johnson · 958 F. Supp. 2d 795 - Corlett v. Oakland University Board of Trustees

3. “do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Brown v. Li E · Brown v. Li E