An Oregon student has lost out on a First Amendment challenge to his one-year expulsion from school over a private journal entry that threatened violence to fellow students and a former employee at his high school.

“Ordinarily, schools may not discipline students for the contents of their private, off campus diary entries, any more than they can punish students for their private thoughts, but schools have a right, indeed an obligation, to address a credible threat of violence involving the school community,” wrote a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.