Six Impossible Episodes: Back-to-Court

This episode takes a quick look at six U.S. Supreme Court cases that all have to do with the rights of children in public primary and secondary schools.

• Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/374/203
• Bowman, Kristine. “West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943).” Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/west-virginia-state-board-of-education-v-barnette/
• Cornell Law School. “Engel v. Vitale (1962).) https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/engel_v._vitale_(1962)
• Dynia, Philip A. “Rights of Students.” Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University. 8/11/2023, updated 5/27/2026.  https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/rights-of-students/
• Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/421/
• Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/484/260/
• Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651 (1977). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/430/651/
• Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651 (1977). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/430/651/
• National Education Association. “Corporal Punishment in Schools Still Legal in Many States.” https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/corporal-punishment-schools-still-legal-many-states
• Oyez. “West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette.” https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/319us624
• Pfeffer, Leo. “THE NEW YORK REGENTS’ PRAYER CASE (ENGEL V. VITALE).” Journal of Church and State, vol. 4, no. 2, 1962, pp. 150–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.proxy.bostonathenaeum.org/stable/23913195. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.
• Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/393/503/
• West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/319/624/#tab-opinion-1937809
• Zinn Education Project. “June 14, 1943: Supreme Court Finds Compulsory Flag Salutes Unconstitutional.” https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/compulsory-flag-salutes-unconstitutional/

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
And I'm Holly Frey. Today's episode was inspired by a
few things. One, it is back-to-school time in a lot

(00:23):
of the U.S. I think by the time this episode
comes out, probably... Most school systems that have a summer
break will be back in class. Yeah. Most of them probably.
But as I was working on it, the returning to
school was in the process of happening. My friend's child
specifically is starting kindergarten, so I have been thinking a

(00:44):
lot about school. Two, I had a random memory about
my own school days. It just, in the moment, I went,
was that real? It was real. but thinking about it
sent me down a big legal rabbit hole. And three,
we have not had an installment of six Impossible episodes
in a while, so why not? Today, we are going

(01:06):
to take a quick look at six U.S. Supreme Court
cases that all have to do with the rights of
children in primary and secondary schools in the U.S. This
is about, to be clear, public school. Private schools are
not run by the government in the same way that
public schools are. So a lot of these constitutional questions

(01:27):
don't apply to private school. And we're also not talking
about colleges and universities because to the court, they are different.
They're not the same environment as a K-12 school at all.
And colleges also, most college students are legally considered adults.
So court cases about college are a little different from

(01:48):
the court cases about K-12. These decisions that we're talking
about today involve topics like free speech, school prayer, corporal punishment,
and search and seizure. And the last case we'll be
talking about discusses drugs. So if any of those issues
are issues for you or the people that you listen with,

(02:08):
heads up. And also, none of this should be taken
as legal advice. I would not want anyone to be
called into the principal's office and say, But stuff you
missed in history class told me to. That's not what
we're trying to do here. That would be terrible. First up,

(02:30):
we're going to talk about West Virginia State Board of
Education versus Barnett, which was decided in 1943 and had
to do with whether children can be required to say
the Pledge of Allegiance in school. The Pledge of Allegiance
was first drafted in the late 19th century, and it's
gone through various revisions. It wasn't officially recognized by Congress

(02:51):
until June 22, 1942, as part of the flag code.
West Virginia v. Barnett needs some setup involving an earlier case.
In 1935, children attending public school in Minersville, Pennsylvania, were
required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. They
had to put their right hand to their chest and

(03:12):
then salute the flag with their arm extended, and they
had to say, quote, I pledge allegiance to my flag
and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all. The Gobitis family were
Jehovah's Witnesses, and they considered this to be against their religion,
in part because it broke the biblical commandment against making

(03:34):
and worshiping graven images, as well as the commandment of,
thou shalt have no other gods before me. Lillian and
William Gobitis were expelled from school after refusing to do it,
and their parents filed suit. This case made its way
to the Supreme Court, and on June 3rd, 1940, the
court decided against the family, essentially saying that a person's

(03:57):
religious belief did not relieve them from having to obey
an otherwise valid law. Also, in the eyes of the court,
school systems and school authorities were allowed to take measures
to foster national unity, and it was not the court's
role to censor state legislatures that tried to do that.
The number of school systems requiring daily pledges of allegiance

(04:20):
increased after the Supreme Court's decision. in Minersville v. Gobitis
because of the decision and because of an increased focus
on encouraging patriotism and national unity in the wake of
World War II. This included schools in West Virginia, where
the State Board of Education adopted the same pledge that
had been cited in Gobitis, with students performing a straight-armed

(04:44):
salute while reciting it. This salute was criticized for looking
too much like a Nazi salute, although the palm was
meant to face upward rather than downward. Students who refused
to say the pledge could be expelled, at which point
they would be considered delinquents, and their parents at that
point could be fined or even jailed. Like the Gobitis family,

(05:06):
the Barnetts were Jehovah's Witnesses, and Walter Barnett told his
daughters not to salute the flag or to say the pledge.
After they refused to recite the pledge, they were expelled
from school, and Barnett filed suit. This case also went
to the Supreme Court, which found in Barnett's favor overturning
Minersville v. Gabitis. This 6-3 decision was announced on June 14, 1943,

(05:32):
which was Flag Day. The majority opinion was authored by
Justice Robert H. Jackson, and it's considered to be one
of Jackson's most important opinions. Jackson wrote, the freedom asserted
by these appellees does not bring them into collision with
the rights asserted by any other individual. It is such

(05:52):
conflicts which most frequently require the intervention of the state
to determine where the rights of one end and those
of another begin. But the refusal of these persons to
participate in the ceremony does not interfere with or deny
the rights of others to do so. The majority opinion
later said, quote, It is not clear whether the regulation

(06:34):
contemplates that pupils forego any contrary convictions of their own
and become unwilling converts to the prescribed ceremony, or whether
it will be acceptable if they simulate assent by words
without belief and by a gesture barren of meaning. The
opinion concluded, quote, if there is any fixed star in
our constitutional constellation, It is that no official, high or petty,

(06:58):
can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion,
or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess
by word or act their faith therein, We think the
action of the local authorities in compelling the flag salute
and pledge transcends constitutional limits on their power and invades

(07:20):
the sphere of intellect and spirit, which is the purpose
of the First Amendment to our Constitution to reserve from
all official control. This was the first U.S. Supreme Court
case to establish that students do have some First Amendment
rights while in school. As it is interpreted today, public
schools can have some kind of in-school observance that incorporates

(07:43):
the Pledge of Allegiance, but it's unconstitutional to force students
to do it or to punish them if they don't.
Our next decision came from the Warren Court when Earl
Warren was Chief Justice. Other Warren Court decisions we've covered
on the show include Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board
of Education, Hernandez v. Texas, and Griswold v. Connecticut. The

(08:08):
post-World War II years marked the start of the Cold
War and the Second Red Scare. The United States started
framing itself as a God-fearing, moral nation in contrast to
the supposedly godless USSR. This was obviously reductive, but it
was also an influential line of thought in the U.S.,
with religion increasingly described as an element of American patriotism

(08:32):
and part of public life. The U.S. added Under God
to the Pledge of Allegiance during these years in 1954,
and an increasing number of public school systems started adding
prayer or Bible reading to the school day. In 1951,
the New York State Board of Regents proposed a prayer

(08:52):
for use in public schools. It was written by Christian
and Jewish religious leaders, and it was meant to be non-denominational.
It read, quote, Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee,
and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers,
and our country. the New York Board of Regents is
responsible for supervising education within the state, and this prayer

(09:16):
was part of a policy statement that said in part, quote,
we believe that at the commencement of each school day,
the act of allegiance to the flag might well be
joined with this act of reverence to God. How or
whether to implement this was up to each school board.
The Board of Education in New Hyde Park on Long

(09:36):
Island directed teachers to lead the class in the prayer
at the start of each school day. Students were allowed
to opt out and leave the room, and some did.
But the parents of 10 students argued that the use
of this prayer in school violated their children's rights, even
though their participation wasn't mandatory. They filed suit against school

(09:57):
board president William Vitale Jr., One of the parents, Stephen Engle,
became the lead plaintiff because his last name was first
in an alphabetical list. The Engles were Jewish, and some
of the other plaintiffs included Jewish, Unitarian, and Atheist families.
No one denied that reciting the regent's prayer was a

(10:19):
religious activity. The basic question was whether state officials writing
a prayer for use in schools was in violation of
the Establishment Clause. That's the part of the First Amendment
to the Constitution that prohibits the government from establishing a religion.
This language was originally written to apply only to the

(10:40):
federal government, But after the Civil War, it was also
applied to the states under the 14th Amendment. Two justices
did not participate in this case. One was ill, and
the other had not taken his seat on the court
yet when the case was argued. The court issued a
6-1 decision in Engel v. Vitale on June 25, 1962,

(11:03):
finding that government-written prayers did violate the Establishment Clause. The
court's opinion was written by Justice Hugo Black, which concluded, quote,
it is true that New York's establishment of its regent's
prayer as an officially approved religious doctrine of that state
does not amount to a total establishment of one particular

(11:25):
religious sect to the exclusion of all others. That indeed
the governmental endorsement of that prayer seems relatively insignificant when
compared to the governmental encroachments upon religion which were commonplace
200 years ago. To those who may subscribe to the
view that because the regent's official prayer is so brief
and general, there can be no danger to religious freedom

(11:49):
and its governmental establishment, however, it may be appropriate to say,
in the words of James Madison, the author of the
First Amendment, it is proper to take alarm at the
first experiment on our liberties. Who does not see that
the same authority which can establish Christianity in exclusion of
all other religions may establish with the same ease any

(12:12):
particular sect of Christians in exclusion of all other sects?
That the same authority which can force a citizen to
contribute three pence only of his property for the support
of any one establishment may force him to conform to
any other establishment in all cases whatsoever. This was the
first Supreme Court decision to find school prayers to be unconstitutional,

(12:35):
and it was incredibly controversial. The families involved faced ridicule
and harassment, and people were furious at the court, framing
its decision as kicking God out of schools. But the
controversy went all the way back to the regent's prayer itself,
which had been criticized for excluding people of non-Christian faiths.

(12:56):
and for not directly referencing Jesus Christ, something that of
course had been done to make the prayer more inclusive
to people of other religions. Yeah, there were people who
really wanted there to be prayer in school who were
actually very happy about this court decision because this prayer
specifically they did not feel was the good one. Not

(13:17):
Christian enough. Right. They generally speaking were not happy about
a similar case that was decided the following year, and
that was School District of Abingdon Township, Pennsylvania versus Shemp.
That was focused on laws in both Pennsylvania and Maryland.
It was two cases that were heard together. Those laws
required the school day to start with the reading of

(13:40):
Bible verses and the Lord's Prayer, and the court struck
those laws down as unconstitutional as well. Other cases related
to prayers and the Bible in school have gone before
the court since then. And they all have their own nuances.
Most recently, in 2022, the court issued a 6-3 decision

(14:00):
in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District ruling that a high
school coach's prayers on the field after football games were
protected under the free exercise and free speech clauses of
the First Amendment. Today, broadly speaking, nothing prevents an individual
person from praying or reading the Bible in school not

(14:22):
really doing so with their friends or family members either.
These cases are about whether the schools or the school
systems can organize, require, or sponsor those prayers and Bible reading.
We will have more cases after we pause for a
sponsor break. Our next couple of cases are also about

(14:49):
First Amendment rights in schools. The first is Tinker v.
Des Moines Independent Community School District, which was also decided
by the Warren Court. In December of 1965, students in
Des Moines, Iowa, planned to wear black armbands to school
in protest of the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.

(15:11):
Principals heard about this and said that students who came
to school with black armbands on would be asked to
remove them. If the students refused to do that, they
would be suspended until they could return to school with
no armband. A small number of students, including four siblings,
came to school wearing armbands, refused to take those armbands

(15:32):
off and were suspended. They returned to school after the
winter holiday break, at which point the planned armband protest
would have been over, but they wore black for the
rest of the school year in protest. Petitioners in this
case included some of the suspended students, John Tinker and
Christopher Eckhart, who were in high school, and Mary Beth Tinker,

(15:55):
who was in junior high. Their fathers filed the complaint
against the school district on their behalf. Their case made
its way through the courts, and the Supreme Court issued
its 7-2 decision on February 24, 1969. Although subsequent cases
have narrowed its scope somewhat, Tinker v. Des Moines is

(16:16):
seen as a landmark decision outlining students' constitutional right to
free speech in school. The court's decision, authored by Justice
Abe Fortas, says explicitly, quote, first amendment rights applied in
light of the special characteristics of the school environment are
available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued

(16:39):
that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to
freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. This
has been the unmistakable holding of this court for almost
50 years. The decision went on to note that there
was a difference between these armbands and things like dress codes. Quote,
the problem posed by the present case does not relate

(17:02):
to regulation of the length of skirts or the type
of clothing to hairstyle or deportment. It does not concern aggressive,
disruptive action or even group demonstrations. Our problem involves direct,
primary First Amendment rights akin to pure speech. The school
officials banned and sought to punish petitioners for a silent,

(17:23):
passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance
on the part of the petitioners. There is here no
evidence whatever of petitioners' interference, actual or nascent, with the
school's work or of collision with the rights of other
students to be secure and to be let alone. Accordingly,

(17:43):
this case does not concern speech or action that intrudes
upon the work of the schools or the rights of
other students. Possibly my favorite passage of this decision, and
maybe even my favorite passage of all the decisions we're
talking about today, quote, in our system, state-operated schools may
not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess

(18:06):
absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well
as out of school are persons under our Constitution. They
are possessed of fundamental rights which the state must respect,
just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the state.
In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit

(18:27):
recipients of only that which the state chooses to communicate.
They may not be confined to the expression of those
sentiments that are officially approved. In the absence of a
specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech,
students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views.
As Judge Guinn, speaking for the Fifth Circuit, said, school

(18:49):
officials cannot suppress expressions of feelings with which they do
not wish to contend. Long story short, under this opinion,
schools can only discipline students for their speech because if
that speech causes substantial disruption at the school or if
there is actual evidence that it will cause disruption. Undifferentiated

(19:10):
fear or apprehension of a disturbance or a desire to
avoid the unpleasantness or discomfort of difficult subject matter is
not enough to restrict student speech. This standard is known
as the Tinker Standard or the Substantial Disruption Test. Tinker v.
Des Moines has also been used as a precedent in
a lot of other Supreme Court cases relating to student speech.

(19:34):
Two justices dissented, Hugo Black and John M. Harlan II.
Black had authored the court's opinion in Engel v. Vitale,
but in this case, Black concluded that the schools had
acted reasonably. He also made a slippery slope argument that
I personally found kind of ridiculous. Quote, school discipline, like

(19:56):
parental discipline, is an integral and important part of training
our children to be good citizens, to be better citizens. Here,
a very small number of students have crisply and summarily
refused to obey a school order designed to give pupils
who want to learn the opportunity to do so. One
does not need to be a prophet or the son
of a prophet to know that after the court's holding today,

(20:19):
some students in Iowa schools and indeed in all schools
will be ready, able, and willing to defy their teachers
on practically all orders. Dude, they were talking about armbands.
Those armbands were not preventing anybody from learning. What I
think is some of the stuff I got away with
in school. One of the cases that cites Tinker more

(20:40):
than 40 times is Hazelwood v. Kohlmeier, which was decided
on January 13, 1988. And it's one of the cases
that inscribed some limits on students' rights to free speech.
The Journalism II class at Hazelwood East High School in St. Louis, Missouri,
produced a newspaper called The Spectrum. several times a year.

(21:01):
It was school policy for the principal to review the
newspaper before it was published. Principal Robert Reynolds had some
concerns about two of the articles from the May 13,
1983 issue, which was the last issue of the school year.
One on teen pregnancy used pseudonyms for its interview subjects,

(21:22):
but Reynolds thought those subjects might still be identifiable. It
also discussed sex and contraception, which Reynolds thought was inappropriate
for the school's younger students. And an article about divorce
named and criticized a student's parent. The journalism advisor had
removed that name from the version that was supposed to

(21:43):
go to the printer, but Reynolds also thought that the
student's parents should have the opportunity to respond to what
was being printed about them in the paper, which is something...
that is supposed to be, at least, a standard part
of the practice of journalism. Reynolds thought that there was
not enough time to make changes to these articles and
still have the newspaper out before the end of the

(22:06):
school year. So he withheld the two pages that contained
these articles, even though he didn't object to the other
articles on those pages. And then the rest of the
paper went to print. Three students, Kathy Kohlmeier, Leslie Smart,
and Leanne Tippett, went to the American Civil Liberties Union
about this. The ACLU had also been part of West

(22:28):
Virginia v. Barnett, and the New York Civil Liberties Union
was part of Engel v. Vitale. This time, ACLU lawyers
filed suit against the school system, and the case made
its way to the Supreme Court. The court issued a
5-3 ruling against the students, finding that their First Amendment
rights had not been violated in this censorship of the paper.

(22:52):
That only adds up to eight because Justice Anthony Kennedy
had been appointed to the court but was not yet confirmed.
The court's opinion was written by Justice Byron R. White.
As we already said, it repeatedly cited Tinker, including stating
that public school students do not, quote, shed their constitutional
rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

(23:16):
But the court had also established that the free speech
rights of public school students at school are not identical
to those of adults in other settings. This decision explored
several distinctions, including whether a school newspaper could be considered
a public forum. In this case, it was not. It
was a limited forum intended mostly for the school. Another

(23:40):
distinction was between tolerating the speech of students, which was
the focus of the decision in Tinker, and promoting student speech.
This newspaper was funded and published by the school, so
the school could be interpreted as endorsing or promoting the
views that were printed in it. This decision concluded, quote,
We cannot reject as unreasonable Principal Reynolds' conclusion that neither

(24:04):
the pregnancy article nor the divorce article was suitable for
publication in Spectrum. Reynolds could reasonably have concluded that the
students who had written and edited these articles had not
sufficiently mastered those portions of the Journalism II curriculum. that
pertained to the treatment of controversial issues and personal attacks,

(24:25):
the need to protect the privacy of individuals whose most
intimate concerns are to be revealed in the newspaper, and
the legal, moral, and ethical restrictions imposed upon journalists within
a school community that includes adolescent subjects and readers. Finally,
we conclude that the principal's decision to delete two pages
of Spectrum rather than to delete only the offending articles

(24:47):
or to require that they be modified was reasonable under
the circumstances as he understood them. Accordingly, no violation of
First Amendment rights occurred. There are other cases that have
established additional limits on the student free speech rights first
outlined in Tinker. One of the more recent is Morse v. Frederick,

(25:08):
a 5-4 decision from 2007, which found that public schools
can prohibit students from displaying messages that promote illegal drug
use at school-sponsored events. We will have two more cases
after one more sponsor break. Our next case that we're

(25:34):
going to discuss was part of the inspiration for this episode.
I don't remember what brought this to my mind, but
I randomly remembered that when I was a kid, there
were a whole lot of teachers who had wooden paddles
on their desks or displayed somewhere in their classroom. That
seemed so wildly contradictory to the attitudes of my parent

(25:55):
friends and my teacher friends today that I had a
brief moment of, wait, was that real? Yes, it absolutely was,
although sitting here in my adulthood, I find it to
be extremely messed up. Looking into whether corporal punishment is
still legal in schools in the United States led me
to the 1977 Supreme Court decision in Ingram v. Wright. Yes,

(26:20):
corporal punishment is still legal in some places. We will
get to that. This case involved James Ingram and Roosevelt Andrews,
who were students at Charles R. Drew Junior High School
in Dade County, Florida. Corporal punishment is still allowed under
Florida law, although as of July 1st, 2025, it requires
parental consent. Under the law that was in place in

(26:44):
Florida in 1970, parental consent was not required, but corporal
punishment could not be, quote, degrading or unduly severe. The
court summarized the law this way, quote, The authorized punishment
consisted of paddling the recalcitrant student on the buttocks with
a flat wooden paddle measuring less than two feet long,

(27:05):
three to four inches wide, and about one half inch thick.
The normal punishment was limited to one to five licks
or blows with the paddle and resulted in no apparent
physical injury to the student. school authorities viewed corporal punishment
as a less drastic means of discipline than suspension or expulsion.

(27:27):
In spite of that policy, Ingram was struck more than
20 times in one incident and required medical attention, and
Andrews was struck in the arms on two occasions— The
court acknowledged that discipline at the school seemed to be
particularly harsh and that these punishments did not align with
the policy. But it was looking at the constitutionality of

(27:51):
the law, not whether the school officials had followed the
law correctly. One constitutional question was whether this law violated
the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads, quote, Another
question was whether it violated the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause.

(28:20):
In a decision authored by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.,
neither of those was violated. The Eighth Amendment was not
relevant because it was intended to protect people who were
convicted of a crime and, quote, the prisoner and the
schoolchild stand in wholly different circumstances, separated by the harsh
facts of criminal conviction and incarceration. The decision went on

(28:44):
to say, quote, the school child has little need for
the protection of the Eighth Amendment. Though attendance may not
always be voluntary, the public school remains an open institution.
Except perhaps when very young, the child is not physically
restrained from leaving school during school hours. And at the
end of the school day, the child is invariably free

(29:06):
to return home. Even while at school, the child brings
with him the support of family and friends, and is
rarely apart from teachers and other pupils who may witness
and protest any instances of mistreatment. The court also found
that under the law, the process for deciding to administer

(29:26):
corporal punishment was sufficient in the context of a school.
There were requirements and safeguards to protect students from being
paddled excessively or without cause. Even though the records showed
some excesses in the case of these two students and
other students, whose stories were part of the evidence in this.
To sum it up, quote, the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against

(29:50):
cruel and unusual punishment is inapplicable to school paddlings. And
the 14th Amendment's requirement of procedural due process is satisfied
by Florida's preservation of common law constraints and remedies. Today,
in most states, corporal punishment is legal in private schools. Again,

(30:10):
those are not run by the government. According to the
National Education Association, which is a labor union representing educators,
corporal punishment is legal in public schools in 17 states
and practiced in 14. There are substantial gender and racial
disparities in who is paddled, with boys and Black children

(30:31):
being paddled far more often. Also, disabled students are paddled
more often, although some states have specifically outlawed corporal punishment
for disabled children. Yeah, the states where it's legal but
not practiced are, for the most part, states where there's
a law still on the books, but all of the
state school boards have banned it. Our last case involved

(30:56):
a 14-year-old student in New Jersey known as TLO in
court records and was about whether searching a student's property
violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
In March of 1980, a teacher caught TLO and another
student smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. The other student admitted

(31:17):
to smoking, while TLO denied it and said that she
did not smoke. The school's assistant principal, Theodore Czaplik, searched
TLO's purse and found cigarettes and rolling papers. Czaplik thought
the rolling papers might be used with marijuana and did
a more thorough search of the purse, finding a bag
of what's described as grass-like substance, as well as other

(31:40):
items that seemed to implicate TLO in selling cannabis drugs.
Choplik contacted police, the police contacted TLO's mother, and at
the police station, TLO confessed to selling marijuana. TLO was
charged with delinquency in juvenile court. Her defense argued that
the search of the bag at school had been illegal

(32:02):
under the Fourth Amendment, which reads, 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.

(32:25):
If the search was illegal, the evidence it unearthed would
be inadmissible. This strategy, though, was unsuccessful, and TLO was
convicted and sentenced to a year of probation. The 6-3
decision in New Jersey v. TLO was announced on January 15, 1985,
and the court's opinion was authored by Justice Byron R. White.

(32:48):
The court found that the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable
searches and seizures does apply to school officials, not just
to law enforcement officers. The court stated that students also
have legitimate expectations of privacy at school, but those expectations
have to be balanced against the school's need to maintain

(33:09):
an environment that is conducive to learning. So this idea
of balance exists for adults outside of school as well.
With a person's expectation of privacy and security balanced against
the government's need for, in the court's words, effective methods
to deal with breaches of public order. This is also
connected to two different legal standards, reasonable suspicion and the

(33:34):
probable cause referenced in the Fourth Amendment. Reasonable suspicion is
a lower standard, requiring less evidence, and according to this decision,
it's enough for a school official to search a student's property.
Probable cause is a higher standard with more evidence involved,
and it's required for things like arrests and searches that

(33:55):
are carried out by police. So the court found against TLO,
and it summed up its thought process this way. Quote,
a teacher had reported that TLO was smoking in the lavatory. Certainly,
this report gave Mr. Choplik reason to suspect that TLO
was carrying cigarettes with her. And if she did have cigarettes,
her purse was the obvious place in which to find them.

(34:18):
After the court elaborated on that point for a little bit,
it continued, quote, Our conclusion that Mr. Choplick's decision to
open TLO's purse was reasonable brings us to the question
of the further search for marijuana once the pack of
cigarettes was located. The suspicion upon which the search for
marijuana was founded was provided when Mr. Choplick observed a

(34:40):
package of rolling papers in the purse as he removed
the pack of cigarettes. Although TLO does not dispute the
reasonableness of Mr. Choplik's belief that the rolling papers indicated
the presence of marijuana, she does contend that the scope
of the search Mr. Choplik conducted exceeded permissible bounds when
he seized and read certain letters that implicated TLO in

(35:03):
drug dealing. This argument, too, is unpersuasive. The discovery of
the rolling papers conceitedly gave rise to a reasonable suspicion
that TLO was carrying marijuana as well as cigarettes in
her purse. This suspicion justified further exploration of TLO's purse. So,

(35:25):
school officials can search students' properties, but they do have
to have reasonable suspicion in order to do so. Yeah,
I feel like this one also has the, like, stepped
angle of it where it's like and i found a
thing that made me need to search more right which
is part of what gets into like the legal trickiness
of how her defense was trying to argue um which

(35:47):
is fascinating yeah there's also a whole like i put
it into the outline and then took it out because
i felt like it was getting longish uh and it
was not actually relevant to the final But during the
proceedings of working its way through the courts, this raised
another argument about whether she had incriminated herself, which is another,

(36:09):
you have the constitutional right not to incriminate yourself. And
it was unclear whether she had intentionally or unintentionally waived
the right not to incriminate herself at the police station itself.
But this was like a whole other question. And this
is a Supreme Court case. Yeah. Did not even get into.
So of all of the cases, I feel like this
one was one of the more complicated of these six

(36:30):
that we've talked about. Yeah, for sure. Do you have
complicated or uncomplicated listener mail? I have some really interesting
listener mail. And I am not sure if this person
goes by just the first name or the first and
their middle name. So I'm just going to say Mary.
This is from Mary. And Mary wrote after our heat

(36:52):
waves episode and said, Howdy, y'all. Just listen to the
three heat waves episode. I'm a U.S. life actuary, and
I've been keeping track of all sorts of mortality trends
as part of my professional life. But I write about
it on my sub stack with some posts on weather
slash climate related deaths. One U.S. historical heat wave you

(37:12):
may want to look into was in 1980. And then
there's links and sources. In the 1980 heat wave, about
1,300 Americans died as a result from that specific heat wave.
A few hundred more died from extreme heat elsewhere. In
the last decade, an increasing number of people have been
dying from extreme temperatures, not only extreme heat, but also

(37:35):
extreme cold. I just realized today I needed to update
for 2025 data, which are now available. If you want
happier weather-related death stories, deaths from lightning have dropped precipitously
over the decades, partly due to improved weather forecasting. And
then there is some information about the source of that

(37:58):
in a chart, which does indeed show the number of
annual lightning strike deaths just dropping from a high of
almost 450 a year until almost none. Wonderful. Between zero
and 50, more than almost none. There are some historically
interesting lightning strike deaths. I came across a grave in

(38:21):
the old burying ground in Hartford, Connecticut, where the person
had died due to a lightning strike. And then there's
information about this person, Captain Seymour, who was 49 and
standing inside his house when the lightning struck it. Another
lightning death I recall is that of a priest and
perhaps altar servers at a church where Verdi, the opera composer,

(38:43):
used to be an altar server slash choir boy. There
had been an anecdote that he had cursed that specific
priest as a boy because he had gotten distracted during
the mass and the priest smacked him in the head
or something. or that one of the altar servers had
bullied him, but it's apocryphal. The lightning strike itself, 1828,
is not apocryphal, Mary. Thank you for this email, Mary. Yeah,

(39:09):
that's cool. I did not know this about the heat
deaths rising, and this chart makes it look like that
there are actually more deaths from cold than heat. But
all of the sources that I looked at from researching
that episode said that on average, heat is the worst.

(39:30):
greatest cause of weather-related death in North America. And it
makes total sense that there would be way fewer lightning
strikes with the combination of better weather forecasting and also
public education and about how to not get struck by lightning. Yes.
Although I have in my lifetime seen some people flagrantly

(39:51):
not doing that. Yeah. I'm remembering the time I was
in Washington, D.C., and I was on the National Mall
when a sudden, you know, summertime thunderstorm blew in, and
I was... running at top speed to take shelter in
a museum, and I ran past a scout leader who

(40:12):
was sheltering under a tree with his troop. And I
yelled at them about how bad that idea was and
that they needed to get indoors. And then I told
my dad about it, who was a scoutmaster for many years,
and dad was irate about this man he had no
contact with. So thank you again for this email. If

(40:37):
you would like to send us a note, we're at
historypodcasts at iheartradio.com. If you would like to see the
show notes for these episodes where you can read just
a whole lot of Supreme Court opinions, if you really
want to, that is at our website, which is missedinhistory.com.
And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.

(41:01):
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