Craig Keefe was expelled from his state-funded nursing college in Minnesota because something he said was deemed unprofessional. He didn’t break any laws with what he said—there were no threats or anything like that—and wasn’t even on campus at the time. He just made a handful of rude comments on his personal Facebook page, unrelated to any curricular project.
Nevertheless, the school had adopted the American Nurses Association’s code of professional ethics, which forbids behavior “unbecoming of the profession” or that “transgresses personal boundaries,” into its student handbook, so the federal district court rejected Keefe’s challenge to his expulsion. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed that ruling, effectively holding that that any punishment of speech under the nursing code is effectively free from First Amendment review.
So now Mr. Keefe, represented by Cato adjunct scholar Robert Corn-Revere, is asking the Supreme Court to take his case. Cato, joined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, National Coalition Against Censorship, and Student Press Law Center, and with the help of Prof. Eugene Volokh and the UCLA First Amendment Clinic, has filed a brief supporting that request.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/against-ideological-litmus-tests-state-funded-professional-schools
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