I dwell here on fairly obscure aspects of the case. They indicate that school officials will need to buy lots of insurance if the views of Ginsburg and Stevens on the question of liability ever command a majority. They also illustrate the limitations of President Obama's "empathy" standard for choosing judges, and suggest a possible question for his Supreme Court nominee.

First, the basics: Acting on a tip from another student that Savana Redding might be hiding prescription-strength ibuprofen pills (and over-the-counter naproxen), school officials told her to strip in front of two women down to her bra and underpants and pull them out, thus exposing her breasts and pelvic area to some extent. No drugs were found. Savana's mother sued the officials and the school district for invading her privacy and humiliating her in violation of her Fourth Amendment rights.

In what may turn out to be retiring Justice David Souter's last majority opinion, all of his colleagues except Clarence Thomas agreed that this "strip search" (though not an earlier search of her backpack and jacket pockets) -- looking for drugs that the officials had no reason to suspect would be very dangerous -- was unconstitutional. But Souter and six other justices (including Thomas) also agreed that the assistant principal who ordered the search enjoyed "qualified immunity" from liability to pay damages. The reason was that the illegality of this kind of search had not been "clearly established law" at the time. On this point, Souter stressed that "numerous... well-reasoned" opinions and dissents by federal appellate judges had held or suggested that similar searches of students were constitutional under a key 1985 Supreme Court precedent.

Souter's opinion in Safford Unified School District v. Redding seems reasonable to me. Not so the partial dissents by Justices Stevens and Ginsburg.

So very generous of you to agree that this "may well" be more traumatic for a girl than a boy due to anatomical and "other differences".  Other differences? Really?

I live in a country, and it is NOT the USA, where the Federal Government has for more than a decade now supported the empirically proven idea that as dictinct groups females, males, adults, children, and teens, do not share a common experience in almost all areas of public policy development. This is not empathy - it is the revealing of systemic bias.