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09-1102 & 09-1112 Badger Catholic, Inc., v. Walsh

By: dmc-admin//September 1, 2010//

09-1102 & 09-1112 Badger Catholic, Inc., v. Walsh

By: dmc-admin//September 1, 2010//

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Constitutional Law
Freedom of speech; university student funds

The University of Wisconsin violated students’ free speech rights by refusing to fund student organizations that engaged in prayer, proselytizing, or religious instruction.

“We deferred action on this appeal while the Supreme Court had Christian Legal Society under advisement. It is the latest in the sequence, beginning with Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169 (1972), and extending through Widmar, Rosenberger, and Southworth, in which colleges or universities set limits on what student organizations they would recognize and fund. Healy, which forbade viewpoint discrimination, did not concern religion, so we have not discussed it. All the other cases in this sequence concern student groups that engage in sectarian speech.

We wanted to see whether the Court would modify the approach articulated in Widmar, Rosenberger, and Southworth. The Court left that approach in place and reiterated the norm that universities must make their recognition and funding decisions without regard to the speaker’s viewpoint. The Justices divided on the question whether Hastings College of the Law had satisfied the neutrality requirement, but no Justice disagreed with the propositions that ‘[a]ny access barrier must be reasonable and viewpoint neutral’ (130 S. Ct. at 2984) and that ‘singl[ing] out religious organizations for disadvantageous treatment’ (id. at 2987) is permissible only if the requirements of ‘strict scrutiny’ can be satisfied. Christian Legal Society described Widmar as a case holding that refusing to allow ‘religious worship and discussion’ in a public forum is forbidden viewpoint discrimination (ibid.). There can be no doubt after Christian Legal Society that the University’s activity-fee fund must cover Badger Catholic’s six contested programs, if similar programs that espouse a secular perspective are reimbursed.”

Affirmed.

09-1102 & 09-1112 Badger Catholic, Inc., v. Walsh

Appeals from the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, Adelman, J., Easterbrook, J.

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