Good News Club v. Milford Central School, 533 U.S. 98, 44 (2001)

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Cite as: 533 U. S. 98 (2001)

Souter, J., dissenting

consistently recognized the particular impressionability of schoolchildren, see Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U. S. 578, 583- 584 (1987), and the special protection required for those in the elementary grades in the school forum, see County of Allegheny v. American Civil Liberties Union, Greater Pittsburgh Chapter, 492 U. S. 573, 620, n. 69 (1989). We have held the difference between college students and grade school pupils to be a "distinction [that] warrants a difference in constitutional results," Edwards v. Aguillard, supra, at 584, n. 5 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).

Nor is Milford's limited forum anything like the sites for wide-ranging intellectual exchange that were home to the challenged activities in Widmar and Lamb's Chapel. See also Rosenberger, 515 U. S., at 850, 836-837. In Widmar, the nature of the university campus and the sheer number of activities offered precluded the reasonable college observer from seeing government endorsement in any one of them, and so did the time and variety of community use in the Lamb's Chapel case. See also Rosenberger, 515 U. S., at 850 ("Given this wide array of nonreligious, antireligious and competing religious viewpoints in the forum supported by the University, any perception that the University endorses one particular viewpoint would be illogical"); id., at 836-837, 850 (emphasizing the array of university-funded magazines containing "widely divergent viewpoints" and the fact that believers in Christian evangelism competed on equal footing in the University forum with aficionados of "Plato, Spinoza, and Descartes," as well as "Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, and Jean-Paul Sartre"); Board of Ed. of Westside Community Schools (Dist. 66) v. Mergens, 496

premises pursuant to the District Court's preliminary injunction is immaterial, cf. Brief for Petitioners 38. As Justice O'Connor explained in Capitol Square Review and Advisory Bd. v. Pinette, 515 U. S. 753 (1995), the endorsement test does not focus "on the actual perception of individual observers, who naturally have differing degrees of knowledge," but on "the perspective of a hypothetical observer." Id., at 779-780 (opinion concurring in part and concurring in judgment).

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