I believe Savanna

Dahlia Lithwick, in her inimitable way, had me both shaking in anger and cringing in sympathy for plaintiff Savanna Redding in her (Lithwick's) account of oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court in the case of Safford Unified School District v. Redding.

The briefest of backgrounds - Savanna Redding, then 13, was strip-searched (that term is vague, so let us be clear: forced to expose her private parts to school administrators) in pursuit of the contraband ibuprofen she was alleged, incorrectly and by a classmate of dubious motives, to be carrying. As anyone who has ever been a preteen girl can easily imagine, the experience of being stripped by school system bureaucrats without being allowed so much as a phone call to her parents*, proved scarringly violative to Redding. A former honor student, she dropped out of school shortly after the incident.

If you don't find this is hilarious, you must not be on the Supreme Court. Because Breyer, Thomas, Scalia and Roberts, at least, found the topic to be a Laff Riot - reminiscing about their own youthful locker room hijinks and giggling over the word underwear. Their disrespectful treatment of Redding's experience, in contrast to the Justice Ginsberg's apparent empathy and frustration during the hearings, prompted Liza Mundy, Lithwick's colleague at Slate, to wonder where the hell are the women:

"That Ginsburg was the only judge who seemed to understand what Redding went through is a stark reminder that judging also involves reacting as a human being, and that this is why we need women human beings as judges."

At the risk of being reductionist, I think Mundy is absolutely right, and I hope more women take notice of yesterday's hearings. The spectacle of a vicious, all-male Senate Judiciary Panel grilling Anita Hill during the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation process prompted a wave of outrage expressed not only in "I Believe Anita" buttons, but in the election of four new women to the US Senate a year later. There's only one voter in the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice or Justices, but I hope he's been paying attention.


*According to Lithwick, Savanna Redding was asked after the arguments "what she'd have wanted the school to do differently. " After having seen her case through so many levels of the judiciary and having her humiliation mocked in the most public of settings, by the supposedly most eminent and sober legal minds alive, her response breaks my heart: "'Call my mom first,' she says."