Ronald W. Rosenberger, et al. v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia et al. (515 U.S. 819)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 29, 1995 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 515 U.S. 819 · 115 S. Ct. 2510
- Decided
- June 29, 1995
- Term
- October Term 1994
- Vote
- 5–4
- Majority author
- Justice Kennedy
- Issue area
- First Amendment
- Disposition
- Reversed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court. The University of Virginia, an instrumentality of the Commonwealth for which it is named and thus bound by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, authorizes the payment of outside contractors for the printing costs of a variety of student publications. It withheld any authorization for payments on behalf of petitioners for the sole reason that their student paper “primarily promotes or manifests a particular belie[f] in or about a deity or an ultimate reality.” That the paper did promote or manifest views within the defined exclusion seems plain enough. The challenge is to the University’s regulation and its denial of authorization, the case raising issues under the Speech and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment. i — I The public corporation we refer to as the “University” is denominated by state law as “the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia,” Va. Code Ann. § 23-69 (1993), and it is responsible for governing the school, see §§23-69 to 23-80. Founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, and ranked by him, together with the authorship of the Declaration of Independence and of the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom, Va. Code Ann. § 57-1 (1950), as one of his proudest achievements, the University is among the Nation’s oldest and most respected seats of higher learning. It has more than 11,000 undergraduate…
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