As a student at Georgia Gwinnett College, Chike Uzuegbunam faced discipline for handing out religious literature on campus, even after receiving permission to use one of the school’s free speech zones.

Legal experts agree that Uzuegbunam had a right to sue the school for violating his free speech and religious exercise rights, which he did in 2016.

But they don’t agree on whether the Constitution permits him to continue his lawsuit now that he’s graduated and the school has overhauled its campus speech code.

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On Tuesday, the Supreme Court considered Uzuegbunam’s case and tried to define what makes a case worthy of the legal system’s time.

It’s important to protect Americans’ ability to seek legal relief when their constitutional rights are violated, the justices said. However, lawsuits shouldn’t continue once the only thing the courts can offer is “psychic satisfaction.”

“People can’t bring a suit for pure vindication alone, for just saying, ‘You know what, I was right, you were wrong,’” said Justice Elena Kagan during oral arguments.

Seeking relief

When Uzuegbunam filed his lawsuit in December 2016, he was seeking several different forms of legal relief. He wanted the court to rule that Georgia Gwinnett’s campus speech code was unconstitutional and to prevent the school from interfering with his free speech and religious exercise rights in the future.

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However, because the school voluntarily changed its speech policies and Uzuegbunam graduated before a judge ruled on the case, the lawsuit had to change.

At this point, Uzuegbunam is seeking only nominal damages, which are a unique kind of legal relief used in cases where it would be difficult or even impossible to figure out the cost of harm done in the past.

“Nominal damages are a mechanism that the Supreme Court put in place to compensate personal harms ... that don’t really have their own independent, monetary value,” said Kate Anderson, a senior counsel for Uzuegbunam’s law firm, the Alliance Defending Freedom, to the Deseret News last week.

If Uzuegbunam succeeds in his nominal damages claim, Georgia Gwinnett would be forced to pay him $1. More importantly, they’d have to formally acknowledge that their past behavior violated the Constitution, Anderson said.

“Even though (nominal damages) amount to just a dollar, they force government officials to do something to recognize that they violated somebody’s rights. That does impact how they’ll behave in the future,” she said.

Georgia Gwinnett officials reject this characterization of the case, noting they acknowledged issues with their school’s previous speech code when they updated it in 2017.

They argue that a nominal damages claim isn’t enough to justify keeping a lawsuit alive once the threat of future harm is gone.

“When there’s no longer any threat that a plaintiff’s injury will recur in the future, a case is safe from mootness only if the court could still give the plaintiff something that redresses what’s now a purely past injury. But nominal damages do not fit that bill,” said Andrew Pinson, who represents Georgia Gwinnett officials, during Tuesday’s proceedings.

When should lawsuits end?

During oral arguments, several justices questioned the value of allowing cases like Uzuegbunam’s to continue.

Judges should spend their time addressing “real and substantial” harms, not listening to hours of bickering about who owes who a dollar, said Justice Clarence Thomas.

“If you’re only asking for a dollar or nominal damages, doesn’t that seem to undermine the real and substantial requirement?” he said.

However, other justices expressed concern about the unintended consequences of ruling against Uzuegbunam.

In some cases, including many involving religious freedom violations, plaintiffs do not have the ability or desire to ask for more than nominal damages, said Justice Neil Gorsuch, noting that these individuals still deserve to have their concerns addressed by the court.

“We have a lot of (briefs) from religious groups that indicate, for example, that they have religious scruples against seeking damages for some injuries they’ve suffered. So they’d lose out” if courts refused to hear most cases involving only nominal damages claims, he said.

People shouldn’t be punished for suffering a harm that isn’t easily assigned a dollar value, said Kristen Waggoner, who serves as general counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom and argued on behalf of Uzuegbunam before the Supreme Court.

“The value of free speech … is nearly impossible to measure,” she said.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case by the end of June.