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SPRING 2012
Page 20A
Adviser Update
Off-campus free speech must be protected
By FRANK D. LoMONTE
ard cases, as Justice Oliver
H
Wendell Holmes cautioned
in a 1904 Supreme Court opin-
ion, make bad law. What Holmes
meant is that cases with distasteful facts and unlikeable parties
tempt judges to back into the
desired outcome without regard
for the broader legal principles at
stake. When that happens, future
parties with more sympathetic
cases become collateral damage.
Tatro v. University of Minnesota is one of those hard cases.
If the justices of the Minnesota
Supreme Court lose sight of the
larger constitutional issues, the
outcome in the case could give colleges virtually limitless authority
to silence speech critical of their
programs, no matter where it is
uttered.
The case began in 2010 when
Amanda Tatro was called before
the student-conduct board at the
University of Minnesota over a
series of postings on her personal
Facebook page. On her Facebook
wall, Tatro had joked about how
she and her fellow mortuaryscience students had nicknamed
their laboratory cadaver “Bernie,”
and about stabbing someone with
a dissecting knife (a reference,
her friends knew, to an ex-boyfriend).
A classmate forwarded the
postings to [