Update: Lorrie Heasley, ‘The Fockers’ and the United States Constitution
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 10.09.05 | 6:08 PM ET
Michelle O’Donnell puts Tuesday’s T-shirt incident aboard Southwest Airlines flight 219 into legal context in today’s New York Times, asking some constitutional law experts about the rights of passengers to wear “offensive” attire and the rights of airlines to kick passengers off their planes.
From O’Donnell’s piece:
Who decides what’s offensive? At many airlines, like Southwest and JetBlue, it’s the job of flight crews.
It can be a nasty business. The crew of an American Airlines flight once removed a passenger after others complained of his strong body odor, said Tim Wagner, an airline spokesman. The passenger was given a voucher for a nearby hotel and returned for a later flight after he had bathed.
Either way, constitutional law experts say that as private companies, airlines are well within their rights.
“The Constitution only restricts the government,” said Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago and the author of “Perilous Times: Free Speech in War Times.”
He added, “One of the most basic facts of the Constitution that the general public doesn’t understand is that the Constitution governs the government, so only the government can violate the Constitution.”
Unless Congress passes a law forbidding airlines from removing passengers because of messages on their T-shirts, no statute has been violated, said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
