Who is Brandi Levy?
BRANDI Levy is the teenager at the center of the "cursing cheerleader" US Supreme Court case. Levy was a 14-year-old high school freshman in Pennsylvania when she crudely expressed her disappointment over not making the varsity cheer team. Brandi Levy is a college student, but it was her conduct in high school that was a springboard to a 2021 US Supreme Court decision. Levy's family looked to the courts after Brandi was suspended from the junior varsity cheer team for a year by the Mahanoy Area School District for using vulgar language in a social media post. The post pictured her and a friend with raised middle fingers and included the repeated use of an obscenity to complain that she had been left off the varsity squad. F*** school f*** softball f*** cheer f*** everything, she wrote near the end of her freshman year, from a local convenience store, on a Saturday. Levy's parents filed a federal lawsuit and the lower courts ruled in their favor. Brandi was reinstated. 3 Brandi Levy Credit: Reuters  The case would eventually reach the US Supreme Court, and the justices voted 8-1 in favor of Brandi in June of 2021. The Supreme Court ruled that the suspension violated Levy's First Amendment freedom of speech rights. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. Despite ruling in Levy's favor, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that we do not believe the special characteristics that give schools additional license to regulate student speech always disappear when a school regulates speech that takes place off campus. 3 The US Supreme Court sided with Brandi Credit: Reuters  "The schools regulatory interests remain significant in some off-campus circumstances.  Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a concurring opinion that school officials got carried away." If todays decision teaches any lesson, it must be that the regulation of many types of off-premises student speech raises serious First Amendment concerns, and school officials should proceed cautiously before venturing into this territory, Alito wrote. Brandi Levy, now 18 and in college, expressed her satisfaction with the Supreme Court ruling in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. The school went too far, and Im glad that the Supreme Court agrees, she told the newspaper. I was frustrated, I was 14 years old, and I expressed my frustration the way teenagers do today. Young people need to have the ability to express themselves without worrying about being punished when they get to school.