A federal judge denied a preliminary injunction request against The University of Alabama in the lawsuit over the closure of Alice and Nineteen-Fifty Six magazines last Friday. The injunction, if granted, would have forced the University to reopen the shuttered magazines. The ruling was condemned by the Student Press Law Center, an organization representing student journalists.
In the ruling Judge Edmond LaCour wrote that the student plaintiffs were unlikely to prevail in their claim, citing the University’s right to control its own speech, the forum doctrine and court precedent on content-neutral restrictions of free speech. LaCour said that all of the University’s actions were “reasonable and viewpoint neutral” and that it had “no obligation to maintain a forum it had no obligation to open in the first place.”
“Its decision to close magazines ‘by and for’ students of just one race or sex is a content-based decision, not discrimination against female or black viewpoints,” LaCour wrote in his decision.
The Student Press Law Center condemnation argued that LaCour’s description of student publications as “limited public forums” was based on a “highly controversial” court case, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, based around restrictions for free speech in extracurricular activities in high schools.
“For nearly six decades, the law protecting America’s public college student media has been mostly clear and straightforward,” said the SPLC’s senior legal counsel, Mike Hiestand, in the statement by the SPLC. “This decision effectively does away with the idea of student media.”
Hiestand said that precedent barred school officials from using the “power of the purse” to censor student media. The SPLC statement additionally criticized LaCour’s description of the magazines as “content” rather than the viewpoints of Black and female students. They argued the decision effectively sidesteps First Amendment protections against viewpoint discrimination.
“This end-around the First Amendment to gut protections for college student media poses a risk to the independence of all college student media in America,” Hiestand said.
While the motion for preliminary injunction was denied, the lawsuit against the University is ongoing. The parties to the lawsuit are scheduled to hold a conference within 21 days of LaCour’s ruling to discuss the discovery process for a potential trial.
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