The Handy Law Answer Book. David L Hudson
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would ‘materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school,’ the prohibition cannot be sustained.”
Justice Hugo Black (dissenting): “Even a casual reading of the record shows that this armband did divert students’ minds from their regular lessons, and that talk, comments, etc., made John Tinker ‘self-conscious’ in attending school with his armband. While the absence of obscene remarks or boisterous and loud disorder perhaps justifies the Court’s statement that the few armband students did not actually ‘disrupt’ the classwork, I think the record overwhelmingly shows that the armbands did exactly what the elected school officials and principals foresaw they would, that is, took the students’ minds off their classwork and diverted them to thoughts about the highly emotional subject of the Vietnam war. And I repeat that if the time has come when pupils of state-supported schools, kindergartens, grammar schools, or high schools, can defy and flout orders of school officials to keep their minds on their own schoolwork, it is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the judiciary. The next logical step, it appears to me, would be to hold unconstitutional laws that bar pupils under 21 or 18 from voting, or from being elected members of the boards of education.”
LegalSpeak: District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)
Justice Antonin Scalia (majority): “Putting all of these textual elements together, we find that they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation. This meaning is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment. We look to this because it has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right. The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it ‘shall not be infringed.’”
Justice John Paul Stevens (dissenting): “The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia. It was a response to concerns raised during the ratification of the Constitution that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several States. Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms. Specifically, there is no indication that the Framers of the Amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution.”
Which interpretation—collective or individual—has the U.S. Supreme Court adopted?
The U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the individual-rights model of interpreting the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). The Court ruled 5 to 4 that the prefatory clause about a “well-regulated militia” does not limit the operative clause that talks about “the right of the people.”
What happened in the Heller case?
In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a District of Columbia law that forbade the private possession of handguns. Dick Heller, a D.C. special police officer who carried a gun in his work protecting the Federal Judicial Center, contended that he also should have a constitutional right to keep a handgun in his home for self-defense and home protection.
THIRD AND FOURTH AMENDMENTS
What was the purpose of the Third Amendment?
The Third Amendment arose out of the special conditions of the Revolutionary-War era when the government sometimes sought to require colonists to house British troops in their private homes. The amendment does not have much practical usage today, as the military has its own bases and quarters.
What is the Fourth Amendment?
The Fourth Amendment is the amendment that provides us with protection from “unreasonable searches and seizures” by law enforcement officials. It provides: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
What is the fundamental purpose of the Fourth Amendment?
The Fourth Amendment serves to protect individuals from invasive searches and seizures conducted by government officials. The Framers worried that government officials could abuse individual liberty by engaging in roving, fishing-expedition searches pursuant to general warrants. The Fourth Amendment generally requires a law enforcement agent to have a warrant backed up by probable cause before being able to search a person and his or her belongings.
What is the meaning of probable cause?
The U.S. Supreme Court defined probable cause in Brinegar v. United States (1949) as: “a reasonable ground for belief of guilt … where the facts and circumstances within their [the officers’] knowledge and of which they had reasonably trustworthy information [are] sufficient in themselves to warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief that an offense has been or is being committed.”
Must government officials always obtain a warrant before conducting a search or a seizure?
No, there are several exceptions to the warrant requirement. Some of these include: searches of public school students, exigent circumstances, hot pursuit, plain view, plain feel, consent searches (where an individual has given consent to a government official to search), search incident to arrest, automobile exception, border-search exception, open fields, and stop and frisk.
LegalSpeak: Redding v. Sanford Unified School District (2009)
Justice David Souter (majority): “Savana’s subjective expectation of privacy against such a search is inherent in her account of it as embarrassing, frightening, and humiliating. The reasonableness of her expectation (required by the Fourth Amendment standard) is indicated by the consistent experiences of other young people similarly searched, whose adolescent vulnerability intensifies the patent intrusiveness of the exposure…. In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear. We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.”
Justice John Paul Stevens (concurring in part, dissenting in part): “I disagree with its decision to extend qualified immunity to the school official who authorized this unconstitutional search.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (concurring in part, dissenting in part): “The Court’s opinion in T.L.O. plainly stated the controlling Fourth Amendment law: A search ordered by a school official, even if ‘justified at its inception,’ crosses the constitutional boundary if it becomes ‘excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction.’”
Justice Clarence Thomas (concurring in part, dissenting in part): “Unlike the majority, however, I would hold that the search of Savana Redding did not violate the Fourth Amendment. The majority imposes a vague and amorphous standard on school administrators. It also grants judges sweeping authority to second-guess the measures that these officials take to maintain discipline in their schools and ensure the health and safety of the students in their charge. 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