Hyannis Kindergartener’s Case Before Supremes

Though a local kindergartener’s sexual harassment case was heard by the justices of the Supreme Court yesterday, according to the New York Times, the most she’ll win is an “empty victory.”  That’s because her case, which began as a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by her parents in federal court in Massachusetts in 2002, has become a dry question of where one federal statute begins and another ends. (Specifically, the lawyers are arguing about whether Title IX should preempt “Section 1983,” a century-old law, in sexual harassment claims.)

The original facts of the case are anything but dry, according to the Times:

The girl, a kindergarten student in Hyannis, Mass., told her parents she was being sexually harassed by an 8-year-old boy every time she wore a dress or skirt to school. Two or three times a week, the girl said, the boy would force her to lift her skirt and pull down her underwear, provoking mocking laughter from the other students on the bus.

The girl’s parents sued after the school refused to discipline the boy or place adult supervision on the school bus. The federal appeals court in Boston ruled against them last year, reasoning that they had not proven that the school had ignored the harassment.  

During the oral argument of the case yesterday, Chief Justice John G. Roberts made it clear that he isn’t from Massachusetts, Kimberly Atkins at DC Dicta points out.

When Chief Justice Roberts called the case, he pronounced the name of the school committee “Barns-TABLE.” Anyone who has spent any time in Massachusetts (DC Dicta included) knows that the town in actually pronounced “BARNS-tuh-bul.” But perhaps out of respect for the Chief Justice of the United States, no one corrected him - not even bench mates Justice David Souter, who is a Massachusetts native, nor Justice Stephen Breyer, who formerly served as Chief Judge of the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

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