Pierce College student Kevin Shaw said he was barred from handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution on campus last fall because he wasn’t in the college’s designated free speech zone.

Now Shaw, 27, has filed a lawsuit against the Woodland Hills school and the Los Angeles Community College District. He alleges the school — one of nine in the Los Angeles Community College District — violated his civil rights by restricting his speech.

“There’s a lot of students affected by the rule,” Shaw said Wednesday by phone. “It’s not just me.”

The rule Shaw referred to is the district’s policy that its colleges are nonpublic forums except for places designated as free speech areas. The president of each college must designate an area on campus for free discussion and expression, according to the policy.

• RELATED PHOTOS: Young Americans for Liberty’s Kevin Shaw at Pierce College’s Free Speech Area

The rule is applied arbitrarily, Shaw said, adding that he has heard from other students who also feel the school’s policy is unjust.

“I’d like to see students coming here after me not having to worry about being silenced,” he said.

Shaw’s lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles, is the first in a Million Voices Campaign by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, based in Philadelphia. The group says its mission is to defend individual rights on U.S. college campuses, including free speech, religious liberty and due process.

“The U.S. Constitution prohibits public colleges from quarantining free speech, but that’s exactly what the 150,000 students of the Los Angeles Community College District endure when they wish to exercise their First Amendment rights,” the organization said in a statement.

“A free speech quarantine like Pierce’s threatens to punish students who speak their minds in the wrong place,” the organization’s director of litigation, Marieke Tuthill Beck-Coon, said in the statement. “The law is clear: Public colleges like Pierce can’t force students into tiny slices of campus to exercise their First Amendment rights.”

Representatives at Pierce College referred questions about the lawsuit to the college district’s office.

“The Los Angeles Community College District firmly stands behind every student’s right to free expression,” said Yusef Robb, a consultant to the district. “We have no further comment on the lawsuit at this time.”

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Shaw said that on Nov. 2, he and two others from Young Americans for Liberty were handing out Spanish-language copies of the U.S. Constitution and talking with students about free speech when they were stopped by a school representative, identified in the lawsuit as “John Doe.” The students were on the college’s mall area and outside the free speech zone, according to the lawsuit. John Doe told Shaw that he was violating Pierce College’s free speech area policy and that Shaw wasn’t allowed to continue his activity outside the free speech area and without a permit for that area.

Free speech zones on college campuses are an outgrowth of Vietnam War-era protests, and since that time, many colleges have revoked their free speech zone policies in the face of student opposition.

A few years ago, Citrus College in Glendora expanded its free-speech zones to include most of campus after a student sued. In Michigan just this year, Grand Valley State University dropped its free speech zones in favor of a broader policy allowing free speech on campus as long as it doesn’t block traffic and follows other rules.

Shaw said in the meantime, he’s trying not to inflame the situation, under the advice of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

“It’s such a delicate situation, I don’t want to provoke anything,” he said. “Hopefully, within the month, I’d like to be out there again handing out the Constitution and talking to students again.”