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Flores v. Bennett Complaint

Flores v. Bennett 9th Circuit Opinion Affirming District Court Decision

Plaintiffs Alejandro Flores, Daniel Flores, and Juliette Colunga were students at Clovis Community College and founding members of the college’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF-Clovis), a conservative student group. To spread their message and attract new members, Alejandro, Daniel, and Juliette — like many other students — would post flyers in the hallways their peers walk through every day on their way to and from class. In November 2021, YAF-Clovis obtained the college’s permission to post flyers criticizing communist regimes on indoor bulletin boards. But after administrators received a complaint that the flyers' content made “several people . . . uncomfortable,” Clovis President Lori Bennett ordered her staff to pull the flyers down.

Clovis' policy banned flyers with “inappropriate or offens[ive] language or themes,” and Clovis administrators suggested they should have used that to reject YAF-Clovis’s posters in the first place. But President Bennett invented an excuse to hide that she'd based her decision on the students' viewpoint. When YAF-Clovis later asked to post pro-life flyers on the day the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Clovis administrators used President Bennett’s excuse to banish the group's flyers from the highly trafficked hallways to a small, outdoor “free speech kiosk,” on a remote part of campus students rarely visit.

Clovis' Flyer Policy was an unconstitutional prior restraint on student speech that discriminated based on viewpoint and gave administrators unbridled discretion to prohibit all kinds of protected expression from a forum the school created for student speech. Clovis administrators discriminated against Alejandro, Daniel, and Juliette’s viewpoints in violation of their clearly established First Amendment rights.

On August 11, 2022, the students of YAF-Clovis—represented by ��֭����—sued Clovis Community College officials to challenge the banning of their flyers from indoor bulletin boards and strike down the unconstitutional posting policy. On October 14, 2022, the District Court enjoined the Clovis administrators from enforcing the unconstitutional posting policy. And on August 3, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the District Court’s decision and upheld the grant of a preliminary injunction.

On August 2, 2024, the District Court entered an order permanently prohibiting the four colleges in the State Center Community College District (including Clovis) from banning “inappropriate or offensive” speech or enforcing any viewpoint-discriminatory, overbroad, or vague policy to censor student-group speech. As part of a related settlement agreement, the District adopted a new posting policy that protects the First Amendment rights of all student groups across the district, paid Alejandro, Juliette, Daniel, and YAF-Clovis $20,000 in damages each, plus $250,000 in attorneys' fees, and will hold annual First Amendment training sessions for all District administrators.

With this lawsuit, Alejandro, Daniel, Juliette and YAF-Clovis achieved a big win for students' rights to freely express their political viewpoints at public colleges.