It should be noted that students at public high schools do have a clear First Amendment right to nondisruptive political speech, that's Tinker, the armband/Vietnam protest case reaffirmed by Roberts' opinion and carped at by Justice Thomas. Also public universities would certainly have the power to impose some restrictions on speech that interferes with the educational mission of the institution. And legitimate time, place, and manner restrictions can be imposed in any free speech context.
The school system's being public is a condition of the First Amendment applying at all. The Constitution only applies to public actors, except for the 13th amendment and the legally unusual cases of a private actor acting as an arm of the government. No one has any First Amendment rights against a private school, employer, corporation, or other nongovernmental actor. So the fact that the Bong Hits case involved a _public_ high school has no implications for its application (or not) to other public educational institutions.
The issue of anarchist "law" is extremely interesting. Marxists think about these issues in the context of the "withering away of the state."
A couple of issues are worth disentangling:
1. Whether there should be constitutional judicial review at all. Lots of people of all political persuasions reject this as undemocratic. They don't have it in England, btw.
2. Whether judicial interpretations of law (constitutional or other) should be "supreme." Chief Justice John Marshall asserted this for bad reasons in Marbury v. Madison (along with nabbing the power of constitutional judicial review), and it's stuck, but some argue that other branches of government should have the power to interpret the law in a way that can't be challenged in court. (AS things stand to some extent Congress can strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over various matters; this may be true of state legislatures.)
4. Whether laws should be enforceable by an authority with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In early medieval Iceland, for three hundred years. there was an elaborate system of written law that was entirely enforced by self-help and public opinion.
5. Whether a stable society requires laws -- rules of behavior for the nonviolent resolution of disputes, for setting up expectations, for dealing with breaches of the peace -- at all.
6. What sort of laws there should be, for example, whether there should be criminal law as a distinct sort of law, or whether punishment should be a permitted purpose or practice, or whether and what ssort of activities might be subject to law-like rules.
These are all distinct issues and shouldn't be muddled together.
--- cgrimes at rawbw.com wrote:
>
> Justice Thomas writes: "As originally understood, ,
> the Constitution
> does not afford students a right to free speech in
> public schools."
>
> ``There weren't any public schools to speak of until
> the 1840s or
> so...'' AD
>
> ---------
>
> But I have a question from the legal beagles out
> there. Since this was
> public school, do these sorts of decisions extend to
> public education
> systems in general. For example, technically a lot
> of the California
> Community Colleges are part of the public school
> districts. And of
> course the State and University systems are also
> public education,
> public schools as it were.
>
> So if one of these latter systems decided to make up
> rules against
> certain kinds of student conduct, say speeches on
> campus about drug
> use would that kind of speech be found to fall under
> this decision?
>
> A more likely scenerio here is if one of the Jewish
> student clubs
> charged its Palestinian rivals with anti-semitic
> speech, or hate
> speech, and the campus administration sided with the
> Jewish
> club. Based on that, let's say the administration
> prohibitied the
> Palestinian club from holding a campus rally for
> Palestinian
> rights. What recourse would the Palestinian club
> have under this
> decision?
>
> The above example did come up here, brought on by
> David Horowitz who
> tried to stir up an free speech controversy with the
> Palestinian student org and the Middle Eastern
> Studies department
> accusing them of anti-semiticism. Thankfully, the
> administration, and
> most of the students just ignored him....
>
> CG
>
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>
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