The Supreme Court ruled specifically for Levy, holding that the school's interests in preventing disruption under Tinker were not sufficient to overcome her First Amendment rights.

[4] The following weekend, Levy and a friend commiserated about the apparent unfairness of this at the Cocoa Hut, a convenience store in downtown Mahanoy City where students often socialized.

[6] One of those teammates was the daughter of one of the coaches, and had herself been suspended from cheering at a few games after she had posted disparaging remarks online about another school's cheerleading uniforms.

[7] Levy, represented by her parents and supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the school in federal court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

Her attorney emphasized that her remarks were those of frustration made on her own social media account on her own time and contained neither threats nor any mention of the name of her school.

[7] In October 2017, four months after Levy was suspended from cheerleading, Judge A. Richard Caputo granted her a preliminary injunction that prohibited the school from enforcing the suspension.

's snap was crude, rude, and juvenile, just as we might expect of an adolescent,"[6] but upheld the district court's holding in her favor, again finding that both Tinker and Fraser did not support restricting her off-campus speech.

[7] Writing for the panel, Judge Cheryl Ann Krause agreed with Caputo that the speech had clearly been off-campus, thus punishing Levy for it violated her First Amendment rights.

The school district petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, arguing that particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic, the nature of online communications required reevaluation of the distinction between on-campus versus off-campus speech in the context of distance learning.

Reporters for the Associated Press and Reuters who observed the oral arguments stated that it was unclear if the court would accept the bright-line ruling of the Third Circuit, as they argued there were compelling reasons for the school to have authority over some types of off-campus speech made on social media.

The Justices considered whether this case was an appropriate vehicle to define new bounds for protections related to student speech, arguing under Tinker that Levy's Snapchat post may simply not have been sufficiently disruptive to warrant disciplinary action by the school.

[17][18] Vox's Ian Millhiser stated that the Justices argued for a more narrow ruling than the case had appeared to originally merit and it was unlikely to become a landmark decision.

[25] Other aspects of Levy's case worked in her favor, including the fact that her Snapchat message was sent to a private circle of friends, and that it did not explicitly name the school or target any individuals.

[28] Justice Clarence Thomas, the lone dissenter, opined that the Tinker Court had never sufficiently explained how the First Amendment would have been understood as applying to student speech at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and cited prior state cases from that period suggesting it was not; Thomas stated "a more searching review reveals that schools historically could discipline students in circumstances like those presented here.