Suspicious Signage
On Sunday, I saw a sign entering a grocery store in Ocean City, NJ, that read (approximately) as follows: "No more than two students allowed, unless accompanied by a parent or guardian." This struck me as intuitively unconstitutional, but I've been trying to rationally explain why this is so.
Now, clearly a store could not prevent entrance to "two or more black people," but, since "student" is not a suspect classification (so far as I know), it seems this the store could discriminate against students if it had a rational basis to do so.
It's hard to find anything rational in the sign, but let's assume that theft and damage in the store are correlated positively and strongly to groups of students (that's the best I could come up with). This leads to several questions:
-Can the store discriminate numerically? (two students are OK, but three are not)
-Is student status really correlated to crime or whatever they're hoping to prevent? (e.g. I would think three dropouts would pose more problems than three students).
-If they changed it to minor rather than student, which is probably what they meant (one can hardly imagine 3 PhD students chucked from the store), would that be legal? What sorts of rights to minors have in these types of situations?
Not sure I have any answers, but it was an odd sign, and I'm really enjoying the notion that the store owners really wanted to keep groups of students out based upon their status as such. Wanted to keep them from disseminating subversive ideas in the canned goods aisle, perhaps?
1 Comments:
Legally, i think it all boils down to the fact that students are not a suspect class and therefore there are no civil rights issues preventing such a rule. The store owners basically have a right to control access to their property..
Even if the store were a state actor, as long as the rule promoted a rational state interest that could not be attained by a more narrowly defined rule, it would be allowed to implement the rule. Of course, you are right that restricting minors would almost certainly be more effective than restricting students..
Morally, i have always felt that discrimination is okay exactly when one is discriminating against members of a group where membership is voluntary. Thus it is okay to ban lawyers from my store, but not to ban women (assuming here that gender is an immutable quality). [Note that i am only expressing a moral opinion, not a legal opinion, and as such this opinion has no impact on my legal analysis.] Of course, the question of which categories are voluntary is a rich one and probably best saved for a subsequent post..
As for the presumed target demographic of the sign (minors), minors can legally (and in my opinion morally) be discriminated against on the basis of their status despite its involuntary nature, but this is a consequence of the fact that minors have restricted rights anyway (see my previous post on society members for an analysis of why this makes sense)..
Post a Comment
<< Home