New Jersey V T.L.O. (1985)

A high school girl was taken to the principal’s office for smoking in the lavatory. She denied smoking and claimed to be a nonsmoker. A search of her purse revealed not only cigarettes but also evidence that she was selling marijuana. In juvenile court, she said that the evidence came from an illegal search. Below are parts of the Supreme Court decision in her case.

After reading the case (copied below the questions ) answer the following questions:

1. Who's rights and needs (which two parties) did the courts seek to balance?

2. What new standard did the court set in this decision?

3. Based on this new standard, are random searches OK?

The following synopsis was taken from the New Jersey V T.L.O. (1985) Supreme Court decision.

We are faced initially with the question whether [the Fourth] Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures applies to searches conducted by public school officials. We hold that it does . . .

To hold that the Fourth Amendment applies to searches conducted by school authorities is only to begin the inquiry into the standards governing such searches . . .

Students at a minimum must bring to school not only the supplies needed for their studies, but also keys, money, and the necessaries of personal hygiene and grooming. In addition, students may carry on their persons or in purses or wallets such nondisruptive yet highly personal items as photographs, letters, and diaries . . . There is no reason to conclude that they have necessarily waived all rights to privacy in such items merely by bringing them onto school grounds.

Against the child’s interest in privacy must be set the substantial interest of teachers and administrators in maintaining discipline in the classroom and on school grounds. Maintaining order in the classroom has never been easy, but in recent years, school disorder has often taken particularly ugly forms: drug use and violent crime in the schools have become major social problems . . .

How, then, should we strike the balance between the schoolchild’s legitimate expectations of privacy and the school’s equally legitimate need to maintain an environment in which learning can take place? . . .

We join the majority of courts that have examined this issue in concluding that the accommodation of the privacy interests of schoolchildren with the substantial need of teachers and administrators for freedom to maintain order in the schools does not require . . . that searches be based on probable cause . . . Rather, the legality of a search of a student should depend simply on the reasonableness, under all the circumstances, of the search . . . Under ordinary circumstances, a search of a student by a teacher or other school official will be . . . justified . . . when there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search will turn up evidence that the student has violated or is violating either the law or the rules of the school.