The ACLU and conservatives want to protect students’ speech rights while the mainstream left is worried about enabling harassment.

Op-ed/analysis by Noah Feldman @ Bloomberg.com, April 28

“Cheerleader” and “Supreme Court” are not concepts you often see juxtaposed. But they are now, as Supreme Court considers the case of Brandi Levy, who was punished by her school for a profane Snapchat post.

The facts of Levy’s case, Mahanoy School District v. B.L., are simple. In the spring of 2017, Levy, then 14, tried out for the varsity cheer squad at Mahanoy Area High School, but only managed to make the JV team. She expressed her reaction on Snapchat in a post that read “F--- school f--- softball f--- cheer f--- everything.” (Our version is expurgated; hers was not.) The post went up on a Saturday, reached some 250 of her friends and, like all other posts to the social media platform, disappeared after 24 hours. Nevertheless, a classmate showed a screenshot to her mother, who happened to be one of the cheer coaches.

The coaches disciplined Levy by suspending her from the team for a year. She had broken two team rules, they said. One prohibited “foul language” — although only at “games, fundraisers, and other events.” The other said that “there will be no toleration of any negative information regarding cheerleading, cheerleaders, or coaches placed on the internet.” For good measure, the school district said she’d also violated school rules stating that members of teams must “conduct themselves in such a way that the image of the Mahanoy School District would not be tarnished in any manner.”

What is most significant legally about Levy’s case is that she was punished for conduct that took place outside of school. In the landmark 1969 case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, the Supreme Court held that kids have First Amendment rights in public schools, provided their speech doesn’t disrupt classwork or invade the rights of others. But the Supreme Court has never said whether speech outside of school can be regulated by administrators [....]