Turning Point USA at Arkansas State University v. Rhodes, No. 19-3016 (8th Cir. 2020)
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The Eighth Circuit affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of defendants in an action brought by a student and Turning Point USA, alleging that defendants violated plaintiffs' rights under the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. Plaintiffs aimed to recruit students for a local Turning Point chapter by setting up a table at the Union Patio. University administrators then asked that the student take down her table.
The court held that the patio is a limited designated public forum in which speech restrictions must be reasonable and viewpoint neutral. Furthermore, the Tabling Policy was not viewpoint-discriminatory. The court held that the Tabling Policy, as applied to the student, is unconstitutional because the distinction between registered student organizations and individual students is not reasonable, when the sole justification offered for the distinction provides no meaningful reason for differentiating the two. Therefore, plaintiffs have put forward sufficient facts to show a constitutional violation. However, the court held that defendants were properly granted qualified immunity because the student's First Amendment right to access a limited public forum, which she was unjustifiably denied, was not clearly established at the time.
Court Description: [Grasz, Author, with Loken, Circuit Judge, and Clark, District Judge] Civil case - Civil rights. Plaintiffs alleged the school officials violated plaintiffs' First Amendment Free Speech rights when the officials prevented plaintiffs Hoggard and Perry from placing a recruiting table for Turning Point, an unregistered student organization, on the school's student union patio; the district court found the officials were entitled to qualified immunity and granted them summary judgment; the patio is a limited designated public forum, and speech restrictions there had to be reasonable and view point neutral; the school's policy of limiting the ability of unregistered groups from having a table in the patio area was not viewpoint-discriminatory; however as applied to plaintiffs, the policy's distinction between registered and unregistered student organizations is not reasonable as the sole justification for the policy - keeping the student union patio a comfortable social space for students - provides no meaningful reason for differentiating the two; plaintiffs have, therefore, put forward sufficient facts to show a constitutional violation; however, the inquiry does not stop there, as the ultimate success of plaintiffs' Section 1983 claim depends on whether it was sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that preventing plaintiff Hoggard from placing the table on the patio was a First Amendment violation; here, plaintiffs have failed to identify controlling authority or a robust consensus of cases of persuasive authority that placed the constitutional question beyond debate at the time of the alleged violation, and the individual school defendants were entitled to summary judgment based on qualified immunity. Judge Loken, concurring.
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