Opinions on Dress Codes from Both Sides of the Courtroom

To the Editor:

In "Litigating School Dress Codes," (Commentary, March 19, 1997), Richard Fossey and Todd A. DeMitchell demonstrate a poor understanding of our case, the U.S. Constitution, and the nature of censorship.

First, they misrepresent our intentions. In challenging the censorship of message T-shirts at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts, neither we nor our attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union sought to "trivialize" the Constitution. We sought to enhance it, by defending the rights of high school students to wear a variety of messages, from the trivial to the profound, from the...