The Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that the strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona girl by school officials in pursuit of drugs (Ibuprofen) did indeed violate her constitutional rights — the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, specifically.  But by a 7 to 2 vote they also maintained that the individual school officials responsible for the strip search should not be held liable, in Safford v. Redding. 

On June 16, the Public Broadcasting Service decided to forbid member stations from carrying any new religious TV programs while allowing the few stations that are already doing so to continue. As the Washington Post reported on June 17, this was a step back from a proposed ban on all religious programs except those that take a journalistic or documentary approach without favoring a particular religious view. Under a complete ban, some PBS stations would have had to give up their affiliation — and, presumably, the funding that comes with it — if they wanted to keep broadcasting local church services or devotional programs.

There are few topics that can divide people who are normally ideological bedfellows like the legal doctrine of the “incorporation” of the Bill of Rights against the states and the Second Amendment. This subject is rearing its head again with the upcoming appointment of a new Supreme Court justice as well as federal courts' recent conflicting opinions in regards to the Second Amendment. The Wall Street Journal reports that on June 2nd, “A federal appeals court in Chicago ruled … that the Second Amendment doesn't bar state or local governments from regulating guns, adopting the same position that Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, did when faced with the same question earlier this year.”