Supremes Back Military Recruiters

In an unanimous Supreme Court decision, the court shot down the law schools and colleges which have sought to bar military recruiters from their campuses:

The nation's top law schools lost a significant legal argument on Monday when a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could withhold funding from schools that bar military recruiters in protest of the anti-gay "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

All eight sitting justices who heard oral arguments in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR) last December rejected the schools' argument that being forced to allow the recruiters on campus violated their First Amendment rights.

"Students and faculty are free to associate to voice their disapproval of the military's message," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. "Recruiters are, by definition, outsiders who come onto campus for the limited purpose of trying to hire students — not to become members of the school's expressive association."

The schools have claimed all sorts of objections, not the least of which is many of their leaders simply don't like the military. The other main exception was the fact that the military does not open its arms to gays and lesbians.

Many law schools across the country began banning recruiters from the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps after the Pentagon's policy barring openly gay servicemen and servicewomen was passed by Congress during the Clinton administration. While most law schools' anti-discriminatory policies are in line with federal equal-opportunity law, the military's ban on gays was legal.

But nearly all law schools require recruiters to sign a form stating the employers they represent do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, national origin or sexual orientation. Because of "don't ask, don't tell," military recruiters were unable to sign that form, and on those grounds were kept from recruiting on campus.

In response, conservative members of Congress in 1994 passed the Solomon Amendment, which is at the heart of the dispute settled by the high court. The law allowed the Department of Defense, along with other departments, to withdraw federal grant money to universities that barred or prevented military recruitment on campus.

A later version of the law allowed the entire university to be penalized, even if only the law school barred military recruiters. Faced with losing millions of dollars in research and grant funding, law schools began inviting military recruiters back, though many granted them only bare-minimum access. Monday's ruling makes those tactics, which included denying recruiters on-campus offices or use of office equipment, unacceptable.

It's nice to see the court get one right. Of course, along with allowing recruiters, the schools will still be free to enroll former Taliban spokesmen.

UPDATE: Okie Boy points out this pull quote from Chief Justice Roberts:

“…Nothing about recruiting suggests that law schools agree with any speech by recruiters, and nothing in the Solomon Amendment restricts what the law schools may say about the military’s policies. We have held that high school students can appreciate the difference between speech a school sponsors and speech the school permits because legally required to do so, pursuant to an equal access policy… …Surely students have not lost that ability by the time they get to law school.“

Heh.