Discipline and Punishment - Constitutional Rights of Students

Transcription

1 Discipline and Punishment - Constitutional Rights of Students Students Constitutional Rights: Public school officials must balance their role as guardian and tutor of the children entrusted to their care against respect for students constitutional rights, including the rights to privacy, free speech, and freedom from unreasonable searches. Schools should be as safe as reasonably possible, and the school environment must be one in which students are able to learn. Over the years, the legal system has wrestled with difficult questions involving the protection of students individual constitutional rights in the public school environment. Students rights to privacy, to reasonable cause for search and seizure, and to technicalities concerning Miranda rights were examined in New Jersey v. T.L.O. (1985). 1 T.L.O. involved a juvenile (known only by her initials) who was suspected of smoking in a public school restroom. A subsequent inspection of the student s purse by the vice principal turned up cigarettes, rolling papers, a bag of hashish, and some file cards containing what appeared to be a list of amounts received for drug sales. School authorities then called the police. Addressing the question of whether the school s warrantless search and seizure was constitutional, the Supreme Court had to evaluate the relative weight of the student s right to privacy against the school s need to enforce an orderly environment. It found the search to be reasonable under the circumstances and therefore constitutional. One of the Court s conclusions was that education requires a disciplined environment; thus, the authority to educate entails the authority to discipline. The Court has continued to define the reach of schools authority. In Bethel v. Fraser (1986) and Vernonia v. Acton (1995), the Supreme Court decided that under the circumstances presented, the students rights were secondary to the schools interest in teaching socially appropriate behavior and preventing student drug abuse. Columbine and Its Aftermath: Zero Tolerance On April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two heavily armed students killed twelve students and one teacher and seriously wounded nearly two dozen others before killing themselves. The following month in Conyers, Georgia, a 15-year-old student wounded six other students. In December of the same year, an Oklahoma middle-school student took a semiautomatic handgun to school and wounded five students. Although these incidents were covered heavily in the media, they were by no means unique occurrences. School violence was on an uptick all around the country. 1 Please do not interpret our use of citations without reference to specific reporters as an indication that you may do the same. Competition participants must provide citations in correct Bluebook format.

2 The tragedy at Columbine brought national consciousness of student violence to a new level. Proponents of more stringent student conduct codes point to the staggering fact that twelve children are killed by gunshot in the United States every single day. Murders perpetrated by children against classmates and teachers have caused a furor of reactive security measures, precaution-taking, and a new commitment to stringent controls in public schools. Zero tolerance policies, which initially referred only to students carrying weapons to school, evolved into broad grants of disciplinary authority to school officials and have fueled provisions for suspensions and expulsions. Many schools nationwide, and particularly in urban settings, instigated entry-area body and bag searches, stricter dress codes, and random drug testing. These security measures are not universally approved. Critics of zero-tolerance policies and increasingly invasive search methods urge the protection of fundamental constitutional rights and encourage educators to return to a positive vision of students. They advocate punishments that teach, rather than imposing measures which tend to encourage students to drop out. Under a policy where students rights are disregarded in the pursuit of student safety, children may begin to view themselves or their classmates as criminals unworthy of respect. Your Assignment Begin by reading Foster v. Raspberry (2009). Using that case as a jumping-off point, please develop and explain a forward-looking thesis discussing some aspect of the competing interests involved in the school disciplinary setting. Support your thesis using only the packet materials. Use this opportunity to demonstrate an ability to synthesize case law and apply it to problems that happen in the real world. Say something interesting. Make a point that helps your reader better understand some aspect of the constitutional limits on schools power over students. Reviewers are looking for excellent legal analysis. Therefore, you should think about your thesis and map out your argument before you start writing in earnest. Your reviewers have read the cases. Please do not waste your time providing a full recitation of procedural or factual details of Foster or the other cases. Instead, focus on aspects of the cases that illustrate your thesis. Good luck. We look forward to reading your submission.

3 Formatting Remember: You MUST NOT include author-identifying information on your written submission. Pages should be numbered, and the formatting requirements are as follows. Notes must be placed at the end of the text as endnotes. No individual endnote should exceed one page in length. The text cannot exceed ten (10) 8 1/2 x 11 pages (title page and endnotes not included). Endnotes must not exceed ten (10) 8 1/2 x 11 pages (you should not need ten pages, it should be more like three or four). Text and endnote pages must have no more than twenty-eight (28) double-spaced lines of text (excluding page numbers and exam numbers). The left and right margins must be set so that no more than seventy (70) characters, including spaces, appear on each line of text. The top and bottom margins, from the edge of the paper to the text, should be no less than one inch. Page numbers may appear within the bottom one-inch margin. We will not penalize students for either single or double spacing block quotations as long as the citation otherwise complies with Bluebook rules (number of words, etc.). We will check your citations using The Bluebook. If you have correctly used either the 18 th or 19 th edition, your grader will be happy. Please let us know which edition of The Bluebook you used by providing that information in a sentence at the end of your endnotes. Technical Requirements Writing for law reviews follows a different set of rules than writing a brief or memo. You must cite your source for every statement that is not your own. If you paraphrase, you must provide a citation. If you quote directly, you must include quotation marks. It is academically dishonest not to cite your sources; that is called plagiarism. The Bluebook organizes its rules by source. The packet materials include law review articles and other information. Look up the rule for the source and go from there. Some information about citing cases is provided below. Please do not consider this the exclusive statement of rules you must follow. The Bluebook provides the rules for this competition. If you run into something that you think is not covered by The Bluebook, Laura at lauralarp@gmail.com.

4 The Bluebook Rules for law reviews should be used in your submission. You can find the rules for law review text and footnotes in The Bluebook, at Rules 2.1 and 2.2. The Bluebook Rules for law review footnotes should be used for your endnotes. (Don t worry, it s not that much extra work.) Here is a chart with some basic information to get you started. Element Law Review Main Text Case Names Case Name Short Form Statutory Compilations Titles of Books/Articles Titles of Legislative Materials Explanatory phrases introducing subsequent case history Introductory Signals, e.g. See Cross references Id. Law Review or Journal title abbreviations Normal SMALL CAPS Normal SMALL CAPS Other Bluebook advice: 2 Example of a case citation: United States v. Legault, 323 F. Supp. 2d 217 (D. Mass 2004) (Jonas, J., dissenting) (noting historical examples). Remember every citation sentence must end with a period. For U.S. Supreme Court decisions, you only need to cite one reporter. You should not provide citations for U.S., S. Ct., and L. Ed. in a row. Remember to eliminate spaces between single capitals, including number/letter combinations for circuits or editions [Rule 6.1]. This is different from ALWD. Both capitals must be singular. If there is a singular capital and a shortened word, the space stays. o For example: N.E.2d, S.D.N.Y.2d, Fed. Cir. or D. Conn. 2 If anything stated herein conflicts with The Bluebook, Bluebook trumps. This information is meant as a starting point.

5 When first citing a case, always provide the page on which the opinion begins. A pinpoint cite is required when the proposition you are supporting comes from a particular sentence(s)/page(s) of a case. You cannot cite merely to the first page unless you are talking about the case in general. If you wish to use a pinpoint cite when first citing a case, then add the page after the first page number. This is true even if both are the same page. o For example: United States v. Legault, 323 F. Supp. 2d 217, 220 (D. Mass. 2004). United States v. Legault, 323 F. Supp. 2d 217, 217 (D. Mass. 2004). Once you have given the full citation, subsequent short forms [Rule 10.9] can be used, but always add the pinpoint cite (e.g. Legault, 323 F. Supp. 2d at 220). For multiple pages [Rule 3.2(a)], only retain the last two digits if the first are identical. Use a dash to separate the pages (e.g or or 188, ). Parenthetical Information [Rules 1.5, 1.6, 10.6]: Additional information is sometimes included after the court/year parenthetical in a following separate parenthetical. Try to use parentheticals, we like them. There are two main types: substantive information [Rule 1.5] and information regarding cases [Rule 10.6]. DEADLINE: 9:00 a.m. June 14 to lauralarp@gmail.com.