With few and very narrow exceptions, newsrooms in America - including student newsrooms - are strictly off-limits to government officials and employees.

File this in your First Amendment First Aid Kit. You will hopefully never need this information, but if you do, you'll probably need it quickly.

Not long ago, as I was just about to catch my train home for the night, I received a phone call from a frantic student editor who told me that his newsroom had been padlocked by his public university officials and that, just moments before, campus police had entered the newsroom and seized a box. Without going into a lot of detail, suffice it to say that the box contained some pretty "hot" stuff. School officials claimed the material belonged to them and - acting on a tip - they were just retrieving their property. Having lawfully obtained the box and begun to use the material it contained for a news story, the editor strongly felt otherwise.

Ownership issues aside, it is clear that the campus police and school officials in this matter violated the law.

With few and very narrow exceptions, newsrooms in America - including student newsrooms - are strictly off-limits to government officials and employees.

Significantly, the most important court case concerning newsroom searches actually involved a student newspaper. The Supreme Court found in Zurcher v. Stanford Daily that a warranted police search of the Stanford University student newspaper office to obtain photographs of a campus demonstration did not violate the First Amendment. In response to Zurcher, Congress passed the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, 42 U.S.C.S. � 2000aa (Supp. 2000). Under the act, law enforcement officials may not search a newsroom or seize work product materials or documents possessed by someone with "a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication..." The language of the statute clearly indicates that student journalists would be covered by its protections.

The act has some exceptions. A newsroom search will be allowed, for example, when: (1) seizure of the material is necessary to prevent human death or serious injury or (2) when the government shows that the person possessing the material it seeks probably committed a crime relevant to the material sought.

For documents possessed by journalists but not personally created by them, the act also has an exception for when the government demonstrates that the journalist is likely to destroy the documents if subpoenaed. In any event, the act provides that a reporter possessing material sought by law enforcement be afforded an opportunity to state why the material should not be subject to seizure.

Additionally, at least eight states - California, Connecticut, Illinois, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oregon, Texas and Washington - have their own laws providing similar or even greater protection.

If you are presented with a search warrant, pull out your copy of the Privacy Protection Act to provide to the government officials and attempt to delay the search until you can consult an attorney. (I heard that one college newsroom has a framed copy of the statute on their wall - just in case.) If the search continues despite your protest, attempt to videotape or photograph the search process, being sure to record your objections to the search on tape. Although you and your staff may not impede the search, you are not required to assist with it (although some assistance may be preferable to allowing police to rummage through desks and file cabinets or seize computers.) No matter what, contact the Student Press Law Center or another legal resource as soon as possible. Legal remedies, including the return of your materials and, in some cases, monetary damages and attorney fees are available.

For a copy of the Privacy Protection Act (suitable for framing, of course), visit the "Reporters' Privilege" section on the Student Press Law Center's Web site at: http://www.splc.org/resources/resourcesindex.html

Visit the Student Press Law Center online at http://www.splc.org.