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Supreme Court Cases: Tinker V. Des Moines

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Not everyone will agree with everything. Even the supreme court seems to diverge when it comes to certain cases, for instance in case of Tinker v. Des Moines. In 1965, Tinker, his sister, and a friend were sent home from school for wearing black armbands protesting the Vietnam War, the wearers did not disrupt the daily classroom activities and was simply performing an act of symbolic speech. The school emplaced a policy banning the black armbands refusing to allow the children to attend school until they were removed. Upon this action, the students’ parents sued the school district. Eventually, the Tinkers appealed to the supreme court, which agreed these actions were unconstitutional. Tinker v. Des Moines is well written and clearly organized that uses relevant evidence to back up its arguments. Similarly, the dissent is well written, but claims lead to an overall weakened dissent. Therefore, the majority opinion is much stronger argument than the dissent. …show more content…
Precedent arguments use previous judgements from, similar cases to show that the rationale should be used again. First he used precedent cases to determine if the armband protest was “disruptive”, in which he found the protest was not. After it was determined the protest was not disruptive to classroom activities, Justice Fortas refers to cases that show a great extent of similarity to the Tinker case. In fact, Justice Fortas refers to more than 11 relevant cases illustrating both students and teachers maintain their civil rights while in school. This shows the students were not removed from the school on just grounds. Each precedent case helps illustrate an important part of the majority opinion's

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