First Amendment-Fourteenth Amendment-Viewpoint Discrimination in a Public Forum

7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Elizabeth Schulte v. Kenneth Leners

Case No.: 25-1856

Officials: Easterbrook, Pryor, and Kolar, Circuit Judges.

Focus: First Amendment-Fourteenth Amendment-Viewpoint Discrimination in a Public Forum

found Schulte, a co-owner of property in Cedar Lake, Wisconsin, challenged actions taken by Leners, the chairman of the Town’s Board of Supervisors. The Town operated a website that allowed public comments, and Schulte used the forum to criticize a post supporting stricter regulation of recreational vehicles. In response, Leners removed Schulte’s comments and those of other critics, prohibited them from making additional comments, and eventually deleted all comments associated with the post. After receiving threats of legal action, the Board decided to remove comment sections from the website entirely. The deleted comments were later restored in a separate discussion thread unrelated to the original post.

Schulte sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in the Western District of Wisconsin, alleging that Leners violated her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights through viewpoint discrimination and the use of vague standards to regulate the website’s comment section. She also alleged that eliminating the comment sections constituted unlawful retaliation. Leners moved to dismiss the claims, asserting qualified immunity. The district court denied the motion as to the claims involving selective deletion of comments, concluding that Schulte sufficiently alleged viewpoint discrimination and that Leners was not entitled to qualified immunity. The court dismissed other claims and permitted an appeal.

The Seventh Circuit reviewed the denial of qualified immunity concerning the selective deletion of comments and found that, by September 2022, it was clearly established that government officials could not engage in viewpoint discrimination in a public forum, including an open website comment section without content-based restrictions. The court determined that the comment section was a forum for private speech rather than government speech because the Town had not adopted rules limiting the content of public comments.

Affirmed.

Decided 08/05/26

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