On a related note, I heard from a lawyer today... that his client, an employer, is being sued by a frequent flying employee, who is alleging forced flying under these conditions constitutes hostile work environment.
The crazy fact is, about 40% of the Supreme Court's civil rights cases turn on the personal experiences of the judges.
"I never did that. So why does anyone else need the right to do that?"
Or, in this case, "they'd better strip search those kids. I smuggled Ibuprofen into school twice a week in my Superman underoos."
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the school officials should be shielded from being sued since the law governing school searches had not been clear...
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy... objected when Adam Wolf, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer for Redding, argued that the strip search was unreasonable because there was no evidence she was hiding anything in her underwear.
"Is the nature of drug irrelevant?" he asked. "What if it was meth to be consumed at noon?"...
It is "a logical thing" for adolescents to hide things, [Justice Breyer] said. A student might stick something "in their underwear," he added, provoking laughter when he said that this had happened to him at school. "It's not beyond human experience."...
"Better embarrassment [of one student] than the risk of violent sickness and death," Souter said.
Imposing Fourth Amendment standards on military action would have made the Civil War unwinnable -- combat occurred wholly on U.S. territory and enemy soldiers were American citizens. The military does not have the time to obtain warrants before soldiers fire upon enemy targets and personnel; the battlefield does not provide the luxury to collect evidence needed to meet probable cause standards in civilian courts. Even if the Fourth Amendment applied, we believed that courts would judge military action under a standard of "reasonableness" -- as they might review a police officer who fires in self-defense -- rather than demand a warrant to use military force to stop a terror attack....
But if the administration chooses to seriously pursue those officials who were charged with preparing for the unthinkable, today's intelligence and military officials will no doubt hesitate to fully prepare for those contingencies in the future. President Obama has said he wants to "look forward" rather than "backwards." If so, he should not restore risk aversion as the guiding principle of our counterterrorism strategy.
