A place apart: The judicial interpretation of campus place as a public forum

This dissertation is a "public forum" legal case study on the federal court case Madison v. Wolf (2005) involving a conflict over the exercise of First Amendment speech rights on the Auraria Higher Education Center (AHEC) campus in Denver, Colorado. The dissertation involves the content analysis of the Mason v. Wolf case opinion and similar federal judicial opinions in order to identify how the judicial interpretations of campus places produce public fora on higher education campuses. The primary research question of this dissertation is: "How do judicial interpretations of campus place in constitutional law produce public fora on public higher education campuses in the United States of America?".;The purpose of this dissertation is to broaden understanding the Public Forum Doctrine by creating a Campus Place Public Forum Typology of campus places judicially interpreted as public forum categories. This research supplements public fora case law by identifying, describing, and for the purposes of the Auraria campus creating a visual representation of the campus place-types as public fora on higher education campuses. The Typology is used to illustrate and transform the abstract concept of Public Forum Doctrine into concrete descriptions of physical locations, which court judges interpret as public fora. Further, the Typology is supplemented by photographic and other descriptive representations to provide a visual representation of campus place-types that have been classified as public fora on higher education campuses.