Summed up in one sentence, from his opinion today in Safford Unified School District v. April Redding:
If a student is reasonably suspected of giving out contraband pills, she is reasonably suspected of carrying them on her person and in the carryall that has become an item of student uniform in most places today.
The “carryall” is referred to elsewhere in the opinion as a backpack.
Associate Justice David Hackett Souter, you will be missed.
The full opinion, which found a strip search of such a student to be illegal under the circumstances, can be found here (pdf).
[UPDATE: And, for the person who asked about my thoughts on Justice Thomas's partial dissent finding the strip search of a 13-year-old suspected of having prescription-strength ibuprofen to be legal, well, one sentence from Thomas sums up his view and my profound disagreement:
This deep intrusion into the administration of public schools exemplifies why the Court should return to the common-law doctrine of in loco parentis under which “the judiciary was reluctant to interfere in the routine business of school administration, allowing schools and teachers to set and enforce rules and to maintain order.” Morse v. Frederick, 551 U. S. 393, 414 (2007) (THOMAS, J., concurring).
Sorry, but we are not going back there. School is not like that any more, nor should it be.]
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Chris Geidner is the award-winning senior political editor at D.C.'s Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, The American Prospect, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications, as well as at his blog, Law Dork. In 2011, he received the Excellence in News Writing Award from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his coverage of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal. Prior to moving to D.C. in 2009, he served as an attorney on the senior staff at the Ohio Attorney General's Office and had earlier worked for a leading Columbus law firm. An extended biography can be found
At least Thomas’s expounding on in loco parentis makes marginally more sense with regard to the 4th Amendment’s scope in public schools than with regard to the 1st Amendment.
But yeah, even his fellow conservative justices shot down Thomas’s claims in Morse that parents are freely handing over charge of their children to the public schools. The combination of mandatory schooling laws and most parents’ practical inability to home- or private-school their children means that parents are coerced to put their kids in the public schools, which in turn obligates the public schools to be aware of their governmental power of coercion over the students. Public schools =/= private schools and home-schooling in terms of parents’ being able to choose how their children are treated.
The fact that the students’ parents are the ones bringing the cases in the first place makes clear that the parents are *not* OK with how the schools treat their children. It’s not like they sent out a “can we strip search your daughter” permission slip on the first day.
(In East Texas, the public schools did send home forms asking if it was OK to paddle the kids. My parents found this hilarious and always signed it “yes,” because they assumed that if I ever did anything so bad that the school wanted to use corporal punishment, the principal would have to find the pieces of me my parents had left behind.)
I firmly believe that schools should be able to maintain such powers over children. But as the majority opinion did not contradict that power, Thomas went to far in this case by seeing no problem with searching the student for IBUPROFEN.
School Districts enacted Zero Tolerance policies so that district staff were forced to apply the policy to all students and not use their own judgment, out of fear of discrimination law suits.
Thomas upholding such blind and robotic adherence to such zealous pursuit of enforcing a minor infraction is disgraceful.
Souter was quite careful to enable schools to continue to search and even strip search students if an immediate danger were present.
If only Thomas were the one retiring…
Souter’s word choice may be charming, but the decision to grant qualified immunity was rather disappointing. The idea that this conduct, so beyond the pale, was not clearly unconstitutional is flatly absurd.
AnonymousCoward,
It wasn’t clear to 5 judges of the 9th Circuit when Ms. Redding’s case was before them, so I can see why it might not have been clear to a school official.