At a New Jersey high school, two students were caught smoking in a bathroom and subsequently brought to the principal’s office and asked if they had been smoking.
One of the students, TLO, said she hadn’t been smoking. The principal then searched her bag and found cigarettes as well as items that suggested that she sold marijuana.
TLO went to court and argued that the school had violated her Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures because having cigarettes wasn’t against school rules and so didn’t constitute the principal’s search of her items from finding her smoking.
When the juvenile court ruled against her, she went to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which ruled for her, saying that the search was unreasonable and
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While students do not and should not have to cede all of their privacy rights simply by walking onto school property, their interests are not the sole interests in mind; safety and order must also be considered and balanced with privacy rights. To do their job, school officials must maintain the order required to keep a smoothly running system. How legal a search is also depends on how objective it is and how reasonable the suspicion was. With TLO, a teacher spotted her smoking, so the principal had reasonable enough suspicion to search her bag, and his finding further evidence of drug use and distribution gave him the reasonable suspicion to search the rest of her bag.
Significance: New Jersey v. TLO loosened standards for what is considered “reasonable” in regards to school searches as well as demonstrated the flexible interpretation of the Fourth Amendment to provide for different circumstances and situations. This case has also been cited multiple times and used in a precedent for cases like Bethel School District v. Frasier. Finally, it established a standard evaluation for deciding whether specific school searches are