SCOTUS sides with cheerleader who mocked her school

[soundchaser]

Reading the decision now, and it's pretty clear-cut, especially this bit:

Second, from the student speaker’s perspective, regulations of off-campus speech, when coupled with regulations of on-campus speech, include all the speech a student utters during the full 24-hour day.  That means courts must be more skeptical of a school’s efforts to regulate off-campus speech, for doing so may mean the student cannot engage in that kind of speech at all.  When it comes to political or religious speech that occurs outside school or a school program or activity, the school will have a heavy burden to justify intervention.

(Side note: I really hate that the Supreme Court decisions have two spaces after every period.)

[soundchaser]

Thomas's dissent (unsurprisingly) doesn't make a whole lot of sense. He relies mostly on an obscure precedent, keeps invoking the concept of "subversive" speech (which is protected by the First Amendment, as I understand) disrupting school order,  and basically ignores the entire concept of in loco parentis meaning limited regulatory authority.

I especially hate this line of reasoning:

Second, the majority fails to consider whether schools often will have more authority, not less, to discipline students who transmit speech through social media.  Because off-campus speech made through social media can be received on campus (and can spread rapidly to countless people), it often will have a greater proximate tendency to harm the school environment than will an off-campus in-person conversation. Third, and relatedly, the majority uncritically adopts the assumption  that  B. L.’s  speech,  in  fact, was off-campus. But, the location of her speech is a much trickier question than the majority acknowledges.  Because speech travels, schools sometimes may be able to treat speech as on campus even though it originates off campus.

So if a student gives an off-campus speech considered "subversive" that gets covered by a local newspaper and then transmitted back to the school, is the student liable for the method of transmission? That seems a dangerous precedent to set.

EDIT: Alito gets feisty about some of this thinking:

...even if flinty Vermont parents at the time in question could be understood to have implicitly delegated to the teacher the authority to whip their son for his off-premises speech, the same inference is wholly unrealistic today.