First Amendment

A New Jersey News Outlet Asks the Courts To Stop a Judge's Censorship

The judge concluded that a high school student's privacy interests trumped freedom of the press.

Jacob Sullum | 8.3.2026 9:10 AM

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A New Jersey news outlet is asking a state appeals court to lift a judicial order censoring its coverage of an incident that led to a lockdown at New Brunswick High School on May 8. That extraordinary order, which New Jersey Superior Court Judge Thomas D. McCloskey issued on July 9, purports to bar New Brunswick Today and every other journalist in the United States from identifying the 16-year-old student who prompted the lockdown by bringing an airsoft pistol to school. It also prohibits them from sharing unexpurgated security camera video of the incident.

In a brief filed last week with the Superior Court's appellate division, New Brunswick Today's lawyers, C.J. Griffin and Bruce S. Rosen, note that such prior restraints on freedom of the press are presumptively unconstitutional. The Supreme Court, which has never upheld such an order, has said prior restraints can be justified only when they "further a state interest of the highest order," such as stopping the release of information that would "set in motion a nuclear holocaust" or "inevitably, directly, and immediately" imperil the safety of U.S. forces at sea. Griffin and Rosen say the state interest that McCloskey invoked, protecting the privacy of the student caught with an airsoft gun, does not come close to meeting that highly demanding standard.

"This case presents an extraordinary violation of the First Amendment—a prior restraint specifically prohibited by the United States Supreme Court," Griffin and Rosen write. "Case law is clear that prior restraints are presumptively invalid. In all its history, the U.S. Supreme Court has never permitted a prior restraint on free speech, not even when newspapers published the stolen, highly classified Pentagon Papers that the government claimed threatened national security."

McCloskey was responding to a lawsuit filed by the New Brunswick Board of Education, which objected to New Brunswick Today's publication of leaked surveillance camera footage showing the airsoft-pistol discovery, which contradicted the board's false assurance to parents that the ensuing lockdown was "a routine security drill." On May 29, McCloskey ordered New Brunswick Today to remove the video and refrain from describing it. He also enjoined New Brunswick Today from "any and all future postings of confidential school security/surveillance video" recorded at "any of the schools in the Plaintiff's District." He did all of that "without any analysis," the appeal brief notes, and ultimately acknowledged that he had gone too far.

The revised order, which McCloskey issued about six weeks later, allowed New Brunswick Today to describe the video, provided it did not reveal the identity of the teenager who triggered the lockdown or any other students in the vicinity. McCloskey also allowed New Brunswick Today to repost the video itself, provided it first "modify the footage by redacting or blurring out the identities of all juvenile students depicted in it" and "present the modified footage to Plaintiff and its counsel for review and approval, with copy to the Court." At the same time, McCloskey extended the targets of the order to include "the press" generally, meaning he........

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