By Jonathan Stempel
(Reuters) -The U.S. Department of Agriculture won the dismissal of a lawsuit by a student who said her First Amendment rights were violated because she could not freely criticize the consumption of cow’s milk, including through the National School Lunch Program, at her high school.
In a decision on Saturday, U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin in Los Angeles said Marielle Williamson lacked standing to sue the USDA over alleged censorship at Eagle Rock High School, and that her claims were moot because she had graduated.
The case began after school administrators told Williamson, then a 17-year-old senior, she could not hand out literature extolling non-dairy milk and criticizing dairy milk and the dairy industry, unless she also handed out materials about the virtues of dairy milk.
Williamson, who is vegan, and the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine sued the USDA and the Los Angeles Unified School District in May 2023.
While the district settled in November 2023, Williamson said a USDA prohibition against restricting the sale or marketing of dairy milk by schools was unconstitutional, because enforcing it violated her free speech rights.
But the judge found no allegations that the USDA itself threatened to silence Williamson, or that the law authorizing the lunch program created a mechanism to punish students.
“Mere allegations of a subjective chill are not an adequate substitute for a claim of specific present objective harm or a threat of specific future harm,” the judge wrote.
Williamson is now a Duke University sophomore studying in China.
Deborah Press, associate general counsel at the Physicians Committee, said the nonprofit will assess how to pursue further lawsuits in light of the decision.
“The problem remains that there are thousands of students who rely on school meals and need an alternative to cow’s milk,” she said in an interview on Monday. “Marielle’s lawsuit raised the conversation to the national level.”
Spokespeople for the USDA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In the November 2023 settlement, Los Angeles’ school district acknowledged students’ right to criticize dairy, and said it would support giving free soy milk to students.
The case is Williamson et al v US Department of Agriculture et al, U.S. District Court, Central District of California, No. 23-03307.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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