Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Safford v. Redding

I just read about a new Supreme Court ruling this morning. It was Safford v. Redding. The case concerned a girl who was strip-searched in order to locate ibuprofin pills which were against the school rules. The court ruled 8-1 in favor of the student. The lone dissenter was Clarence Thomas.

It has already been interesting reading public reactions to this. My own initial reaction was to be quite happy with the majority. Now that I've found the transcript (see here), I find that the case gets even more interesting.

I'll preface by saying I don't like things like zero tolerance policies. I was once in an office and a coworker (We worked together for about six weeks ten years ago and we're still in contact.) got off the phone with a school administrator who was upset that her daughter had been found in possession of aspirin. I loved hearing this woman rant after getting off the phone in what had been the most cordial and even of polite conversations. She just hated what kids are subjected to, and knew how especially bad it was when smart kids had to watch authority used in such a fashion.

That said, when I read the transcript, I find that the school in question in this current case had had actual experience with prescription drugs causing illness, in one case with a student being airlifted from the school. This was not some rubber-stamping of some other school's silly policy, but a reaction to actual experience. Whether the reaction was a good one is a live question, but these important details are not coming forth in the blogs I've seen.

I've also seen some liberal bloggers trying to use this case as a launching point for why we need someone like Sotomayor who, like Ginsburg, could empathize with the female victim. They cite some lines from the questioning to argue that the male justices don't get it. I think they are either disingenuous or they haven't read many cases. It takes a while to get a sense of what the different justices are really up to in their questioning. They often ask devil's advocate questions. In questioning, Justice Scalia could at points make you think he was a liberal. Justice Ginsburg could at points make you think she was an arch conservative. But they're not stating positions there. They're gathering information. Given that the vote was 8 to 1, it is clear that their apparent lack of empathy was beside the point. I do want justices with empathy. But I also want to see the rule of law upheld. That requires some cold reading.

This case is a complicated one. When I read Clarence Thomas, I am really torn. On the one hand, he makes some valid points about how schools need to be free of intrusive second-guessing by the courts if they are to maintain discipline. On the other, he's speaking of public schools that are an arm of the state, which makes the municipalization of the Bill of Rights under the Fourteenth Amendment even more crucial. As has been stated in past rulings, students don't lose their rights when they enter the school. Teachers do act in loco parentis, but when the state supplies the teachers, they must be held to a high standard here, whatever the cost. For how they treat students teaches fundamental things about our free society that no amount of curriculum can outweigh. Is it really more important for students to memorize the Fourth Amendment in a quiet environment than to see it honored by school administration?

Since first posting the above, I have had occasion to read the full arguments and opinions of the court. I am even more convinced that the majority was in the right. Their questions were interesting to me. It took some time to get the facts straight. Some elements that received little attention during questioning proved decisive in the end. For instance, the fact that the girl who accused her friend of possessing prohibited prescription drugs was not cross-examined before her testimony was used as grounds for a strip search. Discussion of carrying pills in one's underwear were quite funny. One person rightly argued that there is a "yuck" factor to this. But one justice asked whether or not this might be a place a student would put pills when they knew authorities were looking for them. (Good question.) The record seemed to indicate that the student did not know she was likely to be searched before the search began. But more important that this was the fact that the pills the administrators had found so far were prescription levels of ordinary painkillers. The potential trauma a strip search would cause an adolescent was not justified by the danger posed. Nor was the evidence of possession strong.

This is one of the few times when I have liked Ginsburg's opinion best. Unlike the other court members, she found that the school administrators should not have been granted qualified immunity. I think she is right. They did go egregiously beyond their authority. The justices had brought up a good clarifying question in the middle of the arguments. If the situation was really as dire as some imagined, and the administrators were not trained to search people or even to know under which circumstances searches were allowed, the situation could have been turned over to the police. Any matter too trivial to justify doing so does not justify a strip search. Any matter grave enough to justify a strip search (And the justices relied on studies here indicating that such searches, as opposed to other nudity, left lasting trauma, because of a common understanding that this is criminal treatment.) is one where experts should be weighing the rights of the accused versus actual dangers. Hysteria about potential dangers can make anything seem justified. While being handed to the police would have been traumatic for the student in another way, had they weighed doing so. the officials would likely have realized that they did not have sufficient evidence to act. Had they gone ahead to call the police, they would probably have been told so over the phone before anyone showed up. A school principal who misunderstands the idea of rights to this degree has no business overseeing the education of students at public expense.

5:59 am Pacific Standard Time

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Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Today's finds

This afternoon I have been looking around at Google Books for helpful books in the study of Greek. I thought I would share my findings for anyone who might find this of interest.

My latest find is my favorite. I have wanted a print version of Hatch and Redpath's Concordance to the Septuagint. It's always expensive enough that I would rather spend my money on something else. Reading another work online, I found that this concordance was compiled between 1892 and 1906, which made it likely it would be available in full through GoogleBooks. I was not disappointed. You can find it here. [Note: Having looked at this a bit, the transmission was bad. Pages are out of order, and I cannot find any pages with words beginning with Π. This may be more helpful.]

Earlier, I had been looking at another work on Homer. This was one cited by Dr. John Warwick Montgomery in his wonderful apologetic work History and Christianity. I wanted to see what a cited passage regarding rejected methods in Homeric research and methods in New Testament research looked like in its original context. What was going to be a case of spot-checking has probably sold me on buying the book in the near future. What a treasure! This will not be the first time Montgomery's notes have sold me a book. (I have bought books on time travel, fairy sightings in Ireland, and the poetry of Ogden Nash because of such notes.) I still plan to compare this to current research, but the arguments look promising at first glance.

Finally, there is the material on Milman Parry, the researcher whose research on modern day transmission of oral poetry fueled his theories on Homeric transmission. I found an online sampling from his book, and a site dedicated to collecting his work.

11:25 am Pacific Standard Time

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Monday, June 15th, 2009

Suite Francaise

A friend recommended Irène Némirovsky's Suite Francaise to me several weeks ago. I ordered it and have begun reading. The book was written in the early days of the Second World War. Némirovsky died before the war was over, a victim of Jewish persecution. She captures the details of daily life and how it was changed by war. I am engaged by the book, though I find that I am not strongly drawn to any character in it. I care about them, but Némirovsky seemed to see human nature with a very jaded eye. While I can hardly blame her for this, it does mar an otherwise excellent book. When Steinbeck wrote about the Joads and their travails, I wasn't sure these were people I wanted to meet, but I loved them.

Another thing that has occurred to me during my reading is what a great achievement it was for Herman Wouk to capture what he did in The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. They clearly took place in the same world about which Némirovsky writes. I may have to re-read those soon. I read them in high school, so it has been a long time. I left those books feeling as if I had lived through the Second World War.

3:48 am Pacific Standard Time

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