I am amazed and very seriously troubled by the language and tenor of arguments at the United States Supreme Court in the case of Safford Unified School District v. Redding. I am also outraged at the tone of the reporting of this language by New York Times writer Adam Liptak.

This is the case of Savana Redding, who was strip searched by school officials in Safford, Arizona, looking for an ibuprofen pill and acting on a “tip” from another student. Redding was 13 and in the eighth grade at the time. Both male and female school officials participated in the search, which found no ibuprofen or any other “controlled substance.”

Here is Liptak’s lead:

The United States Supreme Court spent an hour on Tuesday debating what middle school students are apt to put in their underwear and what should be done about it.

After that it’s all downhill. Liptak reports with apparent relish comments from the justices which are vulgar, voyeuristic, and offensive. Apparently, even Redding’s attorney participated in the verbal undressing of his client, commenting at one point that “there’s a certain ick factor to this.”

At another point, compounding the “ick factor,” Justice Breyer offered the following profundity:

In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, . . . We changed for gym, O.K.? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.

After which, according to Liptak, “The courtroom rocked with laughter, and the justice grew a little flustered at having apparently misspoken.”

According to Liptak, “While Supreme Court arguments can often be bone-dry exercises in statutory exegesis and doctrinal refinement, Tuesday’s session was grounded in vivid facts: school snitches, drugs, underwear and body cavities.” At one point, Justice Roberts exclaimed, “The issue here covers the brassiere as well, which doesn’t seem as outlandish as the underpants.” Later, Justice Scalia, with his usual profound confidence, asserted:

You search in the student’s pack, you search the student’s outer garments, and you have a reasonable suspicion that the student has drugs. . . . Don’t you have, after conducting all these other searches, a reasonable suspicion that she has drugs in her underpants . . . ? You’ve searched everywhere else. . . . By God, the drugs must be in her underpants.

This might be funny, if it weren’t so awful. And nowhere in this discourse, not from the attorney for the plaintiff, nor from the federal attorneys arguing as friends of the court, nor from the justices (except for Justice Ginsburg), nor from the reporter, is there any recognition of the obscenity of the violation of this young woman’s privacy, her body, and her person by mindless school officials mindlessly enforcing a mindless zero-tolerance policy.

I’m surprised that Liptak didn’t report Justice Ginsburg’s remarks critical of the strip search, as several bloggers have done. Indeed, Liptak seems eager to join in the boys’ club atmosphere he describes. One blogger notes that

After [Justice] Breyer wondered aloud just “how bad” the search really was, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg interrupted energetically to underscore how bad it was. She said Redding and another student in the case weren’t just told to strip to their underwear. “They were asked to shake their bras out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out.”

The same blogger remarks ruefully that “Ginsburg has said more than once that she feels lonely on the Court as the only woman;” and adds that “this must have been one moment when that loneliness was acute.”

According to Liptak, the court’s mood was summed up when Justice Souter remarked as follows, “My thought process, . . . is I would rather have the kid embarrassed by a strip search, if we can’t find anything short of that, than to have some other kids dead because the stuff is distributed at lunchtime and things go awry.” Begging the court and the reporter’s pardon, the insensitivity of this remark is worse than appalling, it is a dishonest appeal to a false choice, and worse still: it is an off-the-rack cliché. It reflects nobody’s actual thinking. It is intellectual junk.

And apparently no thought on anybody’s part, either, that the events at issue occurred in a school, or any concern about what such scenarios teach. Here’s what they teach — that the people who have the power in life can do anything they want to you, and you have no recourse. They teach that to young vulnerable teenagers. I’m glad Savana Redding is fighting back. I hope she wins. I would have no objection to a little jail time for the school officials who molested her.

But if the language of the majority of the justices here noted is an indication of the seriousness with which this case will be adjudicated, I don’t have much hope.