Spaz

Ah, ok, now I get it.

Loren Pechtel

And that's the case I'm referring to, also. If the parents knew the situation, ok, no theft, no force. They didn't know, though.

Autonemesis

We now return you to your regularly scheduled flame war.

Pomp

This is, as has been noted, a very idiosyncratic reading of the Fourth Amendment. I disagree with your interpretation for two reasons:

First, the fact that it is a publicly stated policy that any supplies brought to school are communal seems to count as "due process" to me. Compare it to a policy that anyone who enters a courthouse will be "forced" to submit to a search and surrender any weapons they have on them. This is not a violation of anyone's rights, as the Fourth Amendment was not designed tp prohibit such policies, any more than it was designed to prohibit offical school supply sharing policies. If, on the other hand, the police stopped people at random on the street, forced them to submit to a search, and confiscated weapons, that would be a violation of their rights. Likewise, if school administrators stopped random students and confiscated their school supplies for redistribution, that would violate their rights.

Second, the key word is "unreasonable," as in "unreasonable search and siezure." While the term is rather subjective, very few people view sharing school supplies as "unreasonable," since it has a number of practial benefits for the eductaional environment, as I described in the other thread.

Pomp

How did we get onto that case? This all started with UMoC's posting a link to a clearly defined school policy that required the sharing of supplies.

Feather

I don't know how the particular case was brought up--that whole thread is one giant train wreck. But that's the particular case I'm referring to.

Autonemesis

Trying to steer this back to what I was interested in originally, instead of bashing that other thread so much - let me ask this:

Is peer pressure a kind of force?

Let's say you send your kids to school with no supplies, because you disagree with the practice. All the other students see your kids with no supplies. Some kids might even say something about it. Is this peer pressure? Is it coercive?