When $50 went missing during the choir class’s sixth-grade field trip, Lanier Middle School’s police officer informed its assistant principal that sometimes “girls like to hide things in their bras and panties.” The assistant principal then ordered the choir’s 22 female members—it isn’t clear whether there were any boys in the choir—to report to the school nurse for strip searches.
Although the nurse “loosened their bras” and “checked around the waistband of their panties,” no money was found. The search at the Texas public school was in any case brazenly improper and probably violated the students’ rights.
That’s according to a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The girls had filed a federal lawsuit against the school district, which readily agreed that it had violated their rights under the Texas constitution. A federal judge nevertheless dismissed the lawsuit, concluding that the girls had failed to state a constitutional claim. The Fifth Circuit reversed that decision last week:
Read the rest at reason.com.
TGIF: Benevolent Self-Interest
The most famous sentence in Adam Smith's 1776 treatise, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, appears in Book I, Chapter 2: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their...
