The Supreme Court this week heard a case on students' rights under the Constitution. The Constitution is written in vague terms, and it says nothing about students, but courts have famously held that students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. After repeating that language, however, the Supreme Court often finds a way to restrict student rights.

The case this time around concerns whether school officials had the right to strip search a 13 year-old girl who was accused of carrying prescription drugs at school. Here's what happened:

In October 2003, one of the eighth graders was Savana Redding, who was 13 years old at the time. Based on a tip from another eighth grader, the middle school’s assistant principal, Kerry Wilson, focused on Savana in an investigation of students who carried prescription drugs to school and used them for non-medical reasons.

That investigation began after officials, suspecting substance abuse at a school dance earlier in the school year, grew wary of violations of a school rule against such uses. Acting on a tip naming Savana, for allegedly giving pain-killing ibuprofen to another student, principal Wilson first inspected Savana’s backpack, but found nothing. Two female aides then took Savana to the school nurse’s office, and conducted a strip search, requiring her to remove all of her outer clothing, and requiring her to expose her breasts and pelvic area by pulling her underclothes away from her body. Again, no pills were found.

So a 13-year-old is strip-searched because of an accusation that she was improperly carrying drugs comparable to Advil. This kind of search would never be legal on the street. But the rules are different in school. Like the military and prisons, students have some rights, but they are limited in light of the special concerns that govern the schoolhouse, at least according to the Supreme Court. Although the Fourth Amendment protects against "unreasonable searches and seizures," that standard has been relaxed in this institutional environments.

How far with the Supreme Court go in allowing officials to search students? Over the years, the Supreme Court has limited the First Amendment rights of student journalists. The Court has also more broadly limited the speech rights of students, most recently in the Bong Hits for Jesus case, where a smart-ass student who held up a nonsense banner during a school outing was disciplined. The Court has also given school officials leeway in searching student purses.

The common thread in many of these cases is drugs. The War on Drugs has restricted students' rights. The Supreme Court thinks that school officials have greater leeway to restrict "search and seizure" and other rights because of the fear of drug use. A real concern, to be sure, but how do we justify strip searching a student over ibuprofen? At least a few Supreme Court Justices may find that this search was legal. No Constitution of mine would uphold a search like this.

The wonders of the modern age include real-time commentary on the arguments before the Supreme Court. Bloggers who attend the oral arguments and read the same-day transcripts offer their analysis on what happened. The sense is that the Supreme Court remains concerned about drugs in school and the Justices will defer to the judgment of school officials in rooting out drug abuse by any means, including strip searches:

It was common for members of the Court — and, especially, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — to express discomfort with an Arizona prinicipal’s order for a close-to-naked search of a 13-year-old girl. But that sentiment did not appear to be as strong as the concern that drugs may be so destructive for teenagers that some surer means of detecting them had to be acceptable under the Constitution.

Isn't there a better way to make sure students are not bringing drugs into school? Are we going to allow strip searches over pills that have the same potency as two tablets of Advil? By the way, the search revealed no drugs at all. The lower federal court noted in rejecting the search that the student could have been detained in the principal's office until her parents arrived. They decided to make her disrobe instead. What the hell is going on here?