Piscataway Tp. Bd. of Ed. v. Caffiero

It is not entirely clear to me what Disraeli had in mind when he observed that there are two things the public should never see being made: sausage and the law.1 But I venture the notion that the remark aptly fits the process in which the Court has engaged today.

We have before us in N.J.S.A. 18A:37-3 a statutory relic, created but a few short years after the Civil War, prior even to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, in the “spare-the-rod” era. There is not the faintest hint of what moved the legislature to come up with this curiosity, other than some vague idea of discipline of pupils…