CNN: ” Supreme Court upholds college military recruiting law”
Law schools across the country have, in recent years, banned military recruiters from their campuses because of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays. The catch is that many law schools receive federal funding, one of the conditions to which is that the law schools must allow military recruiters on campus.
The federal law, known as the Solomon Amendment after its first congressional sponsor, mandates that universities give the military the same access as other recruiters or forfeit federal money.
The case pitted the government’s spending power against the schools’ right to associate and their right to free speech. The law schools argued that they could not survive without federal funding, and that forcing them to accept military recruiters forced them to associate against their will, and forced them to appear to advocate the military’s policies. Justice Roberts wrote the opinion, in which the Supreme Court held:
“A military recruiter’s mere presence on campus does not violate a law school’s right to associate, regardless of how repugnant the law school considers the recruiter’s message.”
