Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L.

In the spring of 2017, fourteen-year-old Brandi Levy failed to make her high school's varsity cheerleading squad and learned she had lost a coveted softball position as well. Over a weekend, from a local convenience store, she posted a Snapchat to roughly 250 friends: a photo of herself and a friend with both middle fingers raised, captioned with repeated profanity directed at 'school,' 'softball,' 'cheer,' and 'everything.' A fellow student screenshot the post and brought it to cheerleading coaches. The school suspended Levy from the junior varsity squad for the full year.

Levy and her parents sued, arguing the suspension violated the First Amendment. The district court agreed, as did the Third Circuit, which held that Tinker v. Des Moines — the foundational student speech case — simply did not apply to off-campus speech. The school district appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that schools must be able to address any student speech that disrupts the school community, wherever it originates.

Justice Breyer wrote the 8-1 majority opinion reversing the Third Circuit's categorical rule while still ruling for the student. The Court declined to hold that Tinker never applies off campus, but it identified three features of off-campus speech that generally diminish a school's interest in regulating it: the student is outside school supervision; the school is not the only institution with authority over the speech; and schools have an interest in protecting student expression even from teachers and coaches.

Applying these principles, the majority found that Levy's Snapchat — consisting of crude but non-threatening venting by a fourteen-year-old to friends, on a weekend, off school grounds — did not warrant discipline. The Court explicitly reserved the question of when schools could regulate genuinely threatening, harassing, or seriously disruptive off-campus speech.

Mahanoy is the Supreme Court's most important word on student social media speech, and its significance lies partly in what it did not decide. The Court refused the school's invitation to allow schools to regulate any off-campus speech with an on-campus effect, which would have dramatically expanded school authority over students' private digital lives. At the same time, by rejecting the Third Circuit's categorical rule that Tinker never applies off campus, the Court left open substantial school authority over genuinely threatening or targeted harassment that originates outside school.

Breyer's framework — focusing on supervision, competing institutional authority, and the school's own interest in protecting student expression — gave lower courts a set of factors to weigh rather than a bright-line rule. The decision acknowledged that most of a student's waking hours occur off campus, that students communicate digitally around the clock, and that permitting schools to regulate all speech touching school life would place an unprecedented surveillance burden on adolescent expression.

Mahanoy has been cited in dozens of subsequent lower court cases involving student social media posts, cyberbullying codes, and school discipline for off-campus speech. Courts have used Breyer's factors to distinguish Levy's frustrated venting from targeted harassment, threats, and impersonation of school officials — categories the Mahanoy opinion suggested might justify school intervention even off campus.

The decision did not resolve the deepest question it raised: whether a student who systematically harasses a classmate through anonymous social media accounts over weeks or months, entirely off campus, is subject to school discipline under the First Amendment. That question continues to generate conflicting lower-court decisions, making Mahanoy a beginning rather than an end of the law in this area.

Student social media speech litigation has accelerated since Mahanoy. Schools routinely monitor student social media accounts, discipline students for posts made from home, and adopt codes addressing cyberbullying, threats, and sexual harassment in online spaces. Mahanoy constrains but does not eliminate that authority, and the line between constitutionally protected off-campus venting and regulable off-campus harassment remains the central unsettled question in student speech law.

As generative AI tools enable students to create fake images and deepfake videos depicting classmates and teachers, courts are being asked whether Mahanoy's framework applies to synthetic content — a question that will define the next generation of student speech jurisprudence.