HYPOCRISY COMES IN many forms, but none are more appalling than when rule makers try to dodge the very rules they create.

I speak of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and his insistence on pre-publication review of two speeches he gave this year that were covered by student journalists.

Kennedy did this not once, but twice recently, first at the George Washington University, then at the Dalton School, a private high school in New York. In both instances, Kennedy's staff asked student-run news organizations for pre-publication review of stories on the justice's remarks.

What is even worse is that in both instances, the students and their advisers didn't put up any fight. Why kind of young journalists are these schools producing if this is how they gather the news?

At GWU, the request came from the high court's publicity apparatus, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

"The Supreme Court's public information office has asked to approve any quotes you use from the justice's speech," a university public relations staffer e-mailed to student reporters.

This prompts the question: how many other times have Supreme Court justices made similar demands of student journalists?

A speech by a Supreme Court justice, of course, is a major score for a university. But at what cost if young reporters are taught in the process to kowtow to the mighty?

At Dalton, reporters sent the

Kennedy has tried to play down the controversy, claiming he didn't know about the George Washington request and that a secretary on his staff requested the Dalton story without his knowledge.

The justice told the Journal that when he reviewed the Dalton story, he thought its author had voluntarily sent it to him to verify his quotes.

Like other justices, Kennedy avoids making comments with professional reporters present; they seem to loathe the notion that remarks may be taken as personal opinions on cases past, present and future.

But Kennedy sometimes makes exceptions for student reporters, he told the Journal.

Now we know why. He thinks he can control the content of their stories.

Absolute restriction against pre-publication review is one of the bedrock principles of journalism under the First Amendment. The government or anyone else has no right to demand review of a story before it is printed or aired.

Apparently this isn't being taught at Dalton, where the head of the school told The New York Times that she found nothing wrong with Kennedy's request and ordered that it be complied with.

What she should have done, of course, was tell Kennedy no. If that meant that a student reporter couldn't cover his speech, so be it.

We in journalism are nothing if we bow to the sort of pressure Kennedy and his Supreme Court underlings applied to Dalton and GWU.

Sometimes people asked to know how they are going to be quoted. I often find that's fair, especially if the requester is a person who doesn't have frequent contact with reporters. But looking at a quote or two is different from a demand to review an entire article. And if the person being interviewed tries to make the interview contingent upon a request, the answer is always no.

Reporters are not subordinate to power. The government doesn't get to pick and choose what goes in a news story. This applies to all governments, from local recreation boards to the highest court in the land.

Anthony Kennedy knows this. But in his mind it applies to everyone but him.

Kennedy is generally considered to be a friend of the First Amendment.

In 1991, he shot down a libel suit against The New Yorker based on claims that the subject of a story was misquoted — which is what Kennedy claims he wanted to avoid in the student press.

"Writers and reporters by necessity alter what people say, at the very least to eliminate grammatical and syntactical infelicities," Kennedy wrote. That happens sometimes "to make intelligible a speaker's perhaps rambling comments."

It is "misleading to suggest that a quotation will be reconstructed with complete accuracy."

That's what Kennedy wrote. On their surface, those words show him to be a proponent of this country's most vital private institution — a free press.

His actions show him to be something far different indeed.

Peele is an investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group who has won numerous journalism awards for reporting on First Amendment issues. Reach him at tpeele@bayareanewsgroup.com.