Legal Commentary

I'm very excited to be doing my first-ever blogging stint on PrawfsBlawg.  I'm in my fifth year on the faculty at Pace Law School, where I teach Education Law, Employment Law, Civil Procedure, and (for the first time next semester) Constitutional Law.  I'm especially interested in K-12 public school students' speech rights.  I really look forward to getting some feedback this month on my current project: students' hostile speech about school officials, especially--but not only--on the internet.   Although student-on-student cyberbullying understandably gets a lot of attention in the popular press, the vast majority of reported decisions about student cyberspeech involve hostility not toward fellow students, but toward teachers, principals, and other school personnel.  And while sometimes this hostility is pretty tame, other times it can be incredibly vulgar and derogatory (if not outright threatening).   I'm interested in how courts and schools should approach this issue, from both legal and pedagogical perspectives.  I'll write more soon, but in the meantime, thanks very much to Dan Markel and the rest of the group for having me!