New Jersey v. T.L.O. | BRI’s Homework Help Series

0:01 Can a school official randomly search your property at school? The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution stops the government from conducting unreasonable searches and seizures. But it also raises an important question. Just what constitutes an unreasonable search at school? This is the story of New Jersey versus T.L.O.

0:29 To understand this case, we need to refer back to 1969 during the case of Tinker v. Des Moines The Supreme Court stated that students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. Just because you’re on school property doesn’t mean you don’t have rights.

0:49 And in the years that followed, other cases would determine how those constitutional rights were applied in school. In 1980, in Piscataway, New Jersey, a 14 year old high school student was suspected of smoking in the girls bathroom, a violation of school policy.

1:11 Brought to Assistant Vice Principal Theodore Choplic’s office, she denied smoking, but Choplic didn’t believe her, and he decided to search her purse. It contained cigarettes, but also some marijuana, rolling paper, a pipe and a list of students who Choplic presumed owed her money for drugs. The police were called in and the girl admitted to selling marijuana at school.

1:34 She was expelled, charged with possessing illicit drugs and convicted. As a minor, her name couldn’t be fully spelled out, so she became known as T.L.O. in all the court documents. T.L.O. thought her property had been searched without a warrant and she decided to appeal her conviction. During the appeals process 2 lower courts sided with the state of New Jersey,

1:57 agreeing that Choplic did have reasonable cause to search her purse. Yet an appeals court reversed the decision in favor of T.L.O. The state appealed and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to make a final ruling. In a 6 to 3 decision the court ruled against T.L.O. , stating that the Fourth Amendment’s protection

2:19 from unreasonable searches and seizures only partly applied to searches conducted by school administrators. And that Choplic’s search was reasonable. Justice Byron White wrote the majority opinion, stating “a search of a student by a school official will be justified when there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search

2:41 will turn up evidence that the student has violated the rules of the school.” He argued that “the need to maintain a sound educational environment meant students should expect a lower level of privacy.” In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the standard set by the majority decision would permit

3:02 administrators to search students for trivial purposes in the future. New Jersey v. T.L.O. was one of several important Supreme Court cases that helped define the boundaries of your rights as a student and showed that students in school do not have the exact same constitutional rights as adults.

3:23 What constitutes a reasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment in schools?