I get the qualified immunity. Unless I’m misinterpreting, this ruling upheld the constitutionality of strip searching children for illegal drugs. In other words, the principal only broke the law because he ordered a strip search for a legal drug. Had he been after ecstacy or pot, the sexual assault of this 13 year old girl would have been perfectly legal, according to the ruling.

Am I making a mistake? Thanks for the feedback.

Seriously? Are we proposing the “damaged goods” theory here? Any person who has experiences outside the idealized norm are not fit to hold any power anywhere in society? Cuz, you know, that’s actually a pretty disturbing proposition.

I was kind of thinking that too. I mean, Thomas’ “infliction of neuroses” isn’t really functionally different (in my mind at least) to Sotomayor’s “wise latina” or the other justice’s presumably “normal white” experience. They’re experiences, they create biases, and they’re about as common as assholes. Thomas might be making his judgments based upon his own personal baggage, but thats kind of what human beings do.

Really, sometimes I think “Beyond Good and Evil” and “On the Genealogy of Morals” ought to be required reading in high school…

Well, a person who was abused by their parents *could* have developed a profound sense of empathy for people wronged by authority, and could have become a Supreme Court justice of the kind who perceives the law as existing to protect the weak from the strong and keep power balanced and equitable. Unfortunately that did not happen with Thomas.

I don’t think anyone is saying Thomas should not be a justice because he was abused, but because whatever he went through turned him into a rigid authoritarian who will invariably support the strong against the weak. I’m not sure that we need to invoke the things he suffered to point out that his beliefs are fucked up and someone with them should not be on the Supreme Court; George W. Bush was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, suffered nothing worse than emotional neglect, and *he* was plainly not qualified for power either.

Seriously? Are we proposing the “damaged goods” theory here? Any person who has experiences outside the idealized norm are not fit to hold any power anywhere in society? Cuz, you know, that’s actually a pretty disturbing proposition.

Qualified immunity applies unless the act was contrary to a clearly established Constitutional right. The majority opinion (incorrectly, in my view) held that the rules for strip searches had not been adequately established to hold an individual individually responsible for their state action. That means that, while it was wrong, in the view of the Court, it wasn’t the sort of wrong that a state official should be expected to know was wrong.

But the meat and potatoes of this ruling is that it has just EXPANDED the power of schools to search our kids, by not only codifying that strip searches of our children by school officials are legal, but by also stating that this principal acted REASONABLY.

Talk about doublespeak: with one breath they rule his actions illegal, with another they call them reasonable and make them legal. Next time he wants to do the exact same thing, he just has to say he was looking for exstacy and the sexual assault of a teenage girl by school officials is perfectly legal. The supreme court said so.

I am getting my kids out of this country. They will not spend one day in this kind of school system.

Today the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 (pdf) that an Arizona school district was wrong to strip-search a then-13-year-old student suspected of having over-the-counter painkillers tucked away in her underwear.
There were several factors that undoubtedly infl…