The Student Press Law Center told The Chart today that it believes the paper’s First Amendment rights were violated when a University administrator prevented the newspaper’s distribution at a college fair on campus on Oct. 8.

“In my opinion I think your first amendment rights were definitely violated,” said Adam Goldstein, attorney advocate with the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va. “The motivation is still a dislike of the content. I think that they can’t restrict the publication in the contact with the college fair, even thought they may, in the abstract, have a greater control over that event than others. So the First Amendment question is still going to be the exact same thing, did they have a content motivation and did it cause a detriment to the publication and in both cases the answer is yes.

“There may be 1,000 reasons why they could reject publication in this space, but one they can’t is that they don’t like what the publication says.”

“It’s a little bit of a logical trap. The reason it’s a logical trap is it doesn’t matter how much control they have in the abstract it matters can they exert that control for this reason, and they can’t.”