New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325 (1985)

The U.S. Supreme Court held the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution applies to searches by school officials and is not limited to searches carried out by law enforcement officers.  The Court reasoned that children in school have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that searches must be reasonably justified at inception and in its scope so as not to be excessively intrusive given a child’s age, sex, and nature of the infraction. The Court offered the following language in support:  

“Schoolchildren have legitimate expectations of privacy. They may find it necessary to carry with them a variety of legitimate, non-contraband items, and there is no reason to conclude that they have necessarily waived all rights to privacy in such items by bringing them onto school grounds. . . [T]he legality of a search of a student should depend simply on the reasonableness, under all the circumstances, of the search. Determining the reasonableness of any search involves a determination of whether the search was justified at its inception and whether, as conducted, it was reasonably related in scope to the circumstances that justified the interference in the first place.”