In a closely watched case, a federal appeals court yesterday ruled that statewide public school guidelines on teaching human rights history can exclude materials disputing that the mass slaying of Armenians in the First World War era constituted genocide.
The decision, written by retired Supreme Court justice David Souter, who occasionally hears cases with the First Circuit Court of Appeals, found that state education officials did not violate public school students’ free speech rights in 1999, when they excluded all “contra-genocide’’ sources calling the Armenian genocide into question.
Van Z. Krikorian, a professor at Pace University Law School who filed a brief
