SCOTUS rules in favor of Christian student banned for preaching Gospel on campus
by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – Explaining that a violation of rights imports damages, the US Supreme Court ruled 8-1 Monday that a former student at a Georgia college could seek nominal damages for being barred from preaching the Gospel on campus, even after the school changed its policy, the Christian Post reports. Chief Justice John Roberts authored a dissenting opinion on various grounds, including that the school had changed its policy and the plaintiff had not alleged actual damages.
A student at Georgia’s public Gwinnet College in 2016, evangelical Christian Chike Uzuegbunam was first banned by the school from preaching and handing out Gospel tracts at an outdoor plaza on campus: he was told free speech was restricted to two specific areas on the site. However, when Uzuegbunam transferred his activity to the designated areas, campus police told him to stop evangelizing because there had been complaints about it. He was then informed his actions were a breach of the “Student Code of Conduct” because the designated areas were not for “open-speaking.”
Uzuegbunam sued the school for a violation of his constitutional right to freedom of speech. The case was pursued because, although the school changed its policy to allow preaching, it refused to accept a penalty for the harm caused: representing the plaintiff before the high court, Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom said students at the college had “lost forever the chance to get those days back and speak their message to their peers.”
Ruling in Uzuegbunam’s favor, the Supreme Court reversed a decision from the 11th U.S. Court of Appeals and remanded the case for further proceedings following the high court’s reasoning, the Christian Post said.
In giving the Supreme Court’s majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote: “For purposes of this appeal, it is undisputed that Uzuegbunam experienced a completed violation of his constitutional rights when respondents enforced their speech policies against him. Because ‘every violation [of a right] imports damage’ … nominal damages can redress Uzuegbunam’s injury even if he cannot or chooses not to quantify that harm in economic terms.”