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Free speech jurisprudence is caught between crediting the First Amendment rights of students when they resemble adults or restricting such rights when students seemingly act as children. In Morse v. Frederick (2007), the Supreme Court ruled against Joseph Frederick and his “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner because Frederick's speech seemed valueless as an adult act, as it lacked any discernible political value. In this essay, Neil Dhingra uses Hannah Arendt's thought to argue that schools should not be interpreted as political spaces but as social spaces where educational authorities should exercise forbearance as students such as Frederick learn to exercise their free speech rights. In particular, students will practice their First Amendment rights by exposing and exploring the discrepancy between appearance and reality, through dark forms of humor, and in forming different types of friendship, all of which schools are unlikely to be able to manage or interpret. Recognizing these unruly and quasi‐humorous forms of First Amendment practice helps make sense of Frederick's banner. Dhingra argues that in order to create space for students to develop freely — that is, without being subject to excessive scrutiny or succumbing to the danger of conformity, or both — schools should show a wide but not unlimited tolerance to speech like that of Frederick, which may otherwise be dismissed as childish and valueless “gibberish.”

Hoffer's "interpretive essay" persuasively argues that the civil rights movement was partially structured by lawyers "acting as lawyers" (p. 2)-not just NAACP lawyers, but the lawyers who unsuccessfully defended Jim Crow, the often reluctant judges who heard civil rights cases, and the growing number of law professors, all brought together by lawsuits. Hoffer introduces these figures in fascinating, short biographical vignettes. Certain arguments between them recur and persist. Recounting Sweatt v. Painter (1950), in which an African American student was denied entry into the University of Texas School of Law (Texas planned instead to create a "separate but equal" law school for black students), Hoffer notes that Thurgood Marshall drew on the Louis Brandeis brief in Muller v. Oregon (1908) to argue from social science findings. Chief Justice James Wooten McClendon of the Texas Court of Civil Appeals rejected such findings as "outside the judicial function" (p. 39), less compelling than local customs that denied racial equality and education premised on it. A unanimous Supreme Court decided for Sweatt, if reluctantly, by admitting social science evidence that suggested a new law school could hardly be equal to the University of Texas. So, Plessy v. Ferguson and "separate but equal" became vulnerable. Likewise, in discussing Briggs v. Elliott (1952), Hoffer notes that Marshall had to argue for the expertise of academic psychologists in contrast to the local knowledge of school administrators who ostensibly supported segregation. Justice Stanley Reed, after opposing counsel John W. Davis dismissed "professors and associate professors" (p. 67), queried if South Carolina segregation laws had been (reasonably) "passed for the purpose of avoiding racial friction" (p. 69). Marshall had to respond that, no, this was just "plain race prejudice" (p. 69). Davis would also make a persisting historical argument: the Fourteenth Amendment's framers had not intended to desegregate schools. However, Davis eventually revealed that segregation existed not only because of history or any perceived need for order, and he quoted British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: "No man will treat with indifference the principle of race. It is the key of history" (p. 79). The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. However, history, it found, really was

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