By MICHAEL C. DORF
Monday, March 23, 2009
Two 2008 federal appeals court rulings—one that may be on its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and another that is already there—raise thorny questions of the extent to which schoolchildren enjoy the protections afforded by the Constitution to adults.
In Frazier v. Alexandre, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rejected a constitutional challenge to a Florida law requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance unless they have previously received written permission from their parents excusing them from doing so. Yet the Supreme Court had appeared to hold in 1943, in West Virginia State Board of Educ. v. Barnette,that schoolchildren themselves have the right to decide whether to recite the Pledge, quite apart from their parents’ wishes. Accordingly, there is a reasonable prospect that the Court will grant review of the Eleventh Circuit’s decision if the plaintiff seeks it.
Meanwhile, in Redding v. Safford Unified School District,an en banc panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit allowed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of an Arizona middle school’s strip search of “a thirteen-year-old girl accused by an unreliable student informant of possessing ibuprofen in violation of school rules” to proceed to trial. The Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Safford Unified next month.