At the 130th annual Fulton Prize Debate held on April 26th in Gasson 305, Christopher Cheek ’25 earned top speaker honors.
The topic for the debate was, “Resolved: The U.S. Supreme Court should overrule the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Shurtleff v. City of Boston by holding that the City of Boston’s third flagpole available for raising private flags is not government speech.”
This is currently a pending case before the United States Supreme Court. The issue in the case is whether the third flagpole on the City Hall Plaza, which normally flies the Boston City flag, is government speech or a designated public forum.
After approving 284 third party flag raisings, the City of Boston denied the Camp Constitution from flying its “Christian Flag.” The group filed a law suit alleging religious discrimination. Boston defended its denial by saying the flagpole was government speech and that it was necessary for the City to deny all religious flag raisings so as to avoid violating the Establishment Clause.
In the debate, Caleb Wachsmuth, ’24 and Sophia Carter, ’22 advocated for the affirmative side and Ian McNabb ’24 and Christopher Cheek, ’25 defended the negative position.
The affirmative argued that since Boston opened its flagpole to a variety of groups and exerted very little oversight over the approval of the flags (i.e., Boston admitted it did not look at the approved flags), the City flagpole became a designated public forum. It also argued that a ruling in favor of Boston would expand the scope of the government speech doctrine and result in the censorship of viewpoints.
In response, the negative argued that a ruling against Boston would result in decreasing freedom of speech because the City would terminate the flying of any third party flags. This would result because if the flagpole was deemed a public forum, the City would be prohibited from excluding any flags based on viewpoints, including the flags of the KKK and Nazis groups.
This year’s judges were six distinguished Fulton alumni, including Wenyu Ho Blanchard, ’95 (Associate General Counsel and Vice President at SP+ ), Jack Minnear, ’95 (Assistant General Counsel at Verizon), Nick Brady, ’95 (US Securities and Exchange Commission attorney), Joshua Marmol, ’99 (Legal and International Sales Executive at GET Group Passport ID), Dominic Cameratta (CFO, Cameratta Companies), and Brendan Benedict, ’12 (private practice attorney, Washington, DC).
In a 6-0 decision, the judges voted for the negative and awarded the Fulton Medal (for top speaker) to Christopher Cheek and the Gargan Medal (for second best speaker) to Ian McNabb.