The Office of the Judge and the Courage It Requires

I am told, by the account in Reason, that a New York trial court judge named Jonathan Schopf recently declined a school district's request for a red-flag order against a thirteen-year-old child — a request that would have included, of all things, a no-knock search warrant. The judge's decision was, the report tells us, a lengthy one. I find that detail significant. A judge who takes the time to explain at length is a judge who understands that the reasoning matters as much as the result.

The particulars of what triggered the school's petition lie beyond what the brief I have been given can fully supply, and I will not speculate into the dark. What I can say is this: the shape of the civic question here is as old as free government itself. An institution — in this case, a school acting with what it presumably believed was protective intent — sought the authority of the state to move against a private person, swiftly and with force, on the basis of anticipated rather than proven harm. That is a posture that every lover of liberty ought to regard with the greatest caution.

The no-knock warrant troubles me especially. Even in my own era, the sanctity of a person's home was considered a cornerstone of English and then American liberty. The idea that agents of the state might enter without warning, without the ordinary ceremony of the law, was treated as a serious exception requiring serious justification — not a routine remedy available to a school administrator worried about a child. If anything, the passage of time has made the stakes higher, not lower. The citizenry's trust in institutions depends on those institutions respecting the boundaries the law sets for them.

I would also counsel that we think carefully about what it means to invoke the full machinery of state power against a minor. Children are not fully formed citizens in the legal sense; they are, more than any other class of persons, in the custody of institutions — families, schools, the law — that are supposed to protect them. To direct those same institutions' coercive powers against a thirteen-year-old, before any wrongdoing has been proven, is to invert the relationship. The law exists to protect the weak from arbitrary power, not to make arbitrary power more convenient for the strong.

Judge Schopf, it appears, understood this. I cannot speak to the precise legal reasoning in his decision — the statutes and precedents of 2026 are beyond my direct knowledge — but the instinct to hold the line, to refuse an expansive grant of authority when the ordinary protections of due process have not been satisfied, is exactly the instinct a well-constituted judiciary should display. Courts that give way whenever they are presented with urgency are courts that, over time, give away the Republic's most durable asset: the predictable protection of the law.

My counsel is this: praise the judge not for the outcome alone, but for the habit of mind the decision represents. A free people must remain vigilant that the language of safety is not used — by schools, by governments, by any institution — to erode the procedural protections that separate ordered liberty from mere order. Every erosion, however small, however well-intentioned, is easier to make than to repair.