Fifth Circuit Rules on University's Policy Restricting E-Mail Access

Monday, January 8, 2007
Contributed by: Andrea L. Slater Gulley

In Faculty Rights Coalition v. Shahrokhi, No. 05-21098 (5th Cir. Nov. 2, 2006), the issue before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was whether a University of Houston Downtown (UHD) policy that restricted e-mail account access violated an adjunct professor's First Amendment rights. The policy at issue disallowed adjuncts access to e-mail accounts during semesters they did not teach (including the summer), restricted adjuncts' sending of e-mails, and implemented a spam filter. The policy was uniformly applied system-wide and was not content-based.

In making its decision, the Court relied on Perry Educ. Ass'n v. Perry Local Educators' Ass'n, in which the United States Supreme Court held that a public school system's internal mail system does not constitute a state-created public forum and that regulations on speech are permissible if the intent of the regulations is not to suppress expression based on the speaker's view. Perry Educ. Ass'n v. Perry Local Educators' Ass'n, 460 U.S. 37 (1983). Because the UHD restrictions and spam filter were uniformly applied system-wide and were not content based and there was no evidence to suggest viewpoint discrimination, the policy did not violate the adjunct's First Amendment rights. Further, the court noted that the policy was reasonable in light of UHD's need to control the quantity of data stored in its system and that doing away with the policies would substantially interfere with UHD's activities.

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