Kyleigh’s Law: Helpful, Annoyance, or… Hazard?

Well, it seems to be a rather sim­ple law impos­ing even more restric­tions on the already greatly-oppressed (in the opin­ions of the teenagers) teenagers. So, of course it sprung up a huge con­tro­versy that’s pos­si­bly threat­en­ing a ride straight up to the Supreme Court.

In case you’ve been liv­ing under a rock or some­where other than the amaz­ing state of New Jer­sey lately, you may be won­der­ing what this law is all about, so here’s a brief (and yet sur­pris­ingly com­pre­hen­sive) expla­na­tion. Young adult dri­vers, dri­vers under 21, must stick red decal stick­ers onto their license plates while they drive to alert other dri­vers that they are rel­a­tively (or greatly) inex­pe­ri­enced and young.

For typ­i­cal teenagers, I’m sure the first thing that comes to mind is that it’d be such a pain to stick those stick­ers on and off when­ever you’re dri­ving. Oh, and there’s all that annoy­ing sticky stuff that always gets left behind when you peel stick­ers off and that you’re usu­ally too lazy to scrape off (unless you’re an OCD-type per­son like me). Your next thought may very like be the same one that has con­cerned moth­ers Donna Traut­mann and Jayneann Stru­ble into actu­ally suing the state of New Jer­sey and its gov­er­nor for pass­ing this law that it infringes on pri­vacy rights. (If you’re an AP Gov stu­dent or some­thing, you may also be enraged over the pos­si­ble vio­la­tion of the Fed­eral Driver’s Pri­vacy Pro­tec­tion Act as well as the Fourth Amend­ment of the actual Con­sti­tu­tion under the cat­e­gory unrea­son­able searches and seizures’.)

Well, as many peo­ple already know, the law was upheld at the appeal and deemed con­sti­tu­tional. The Appel­late panel declared that while the pri­vacy acts list of restricted per­sonal infor­ma­tion is long and (aptly– termed) exhaus­tive, it never men­tions age or age group, and that rather than dis­clos­ing pri­vate infor­ma­tion about the indi­vid­ual, it sim­ply groups him or her into a gen­eral pop­u­la­tion group.

Yeah, but it’s still annoy­ing, know­ing that other peo­ple will see those decals and auto­mat­i­cally form a bias against you other dri­vers, the police, and… Rapists? Pos­si­bly. Inves­ti­ga­tion is under­way in order to affirm whether or not the rel­a­tively new law is more of a haz­ard than a safety pre­cau­tion for young dri­vers, and in the mean­time, the two moms are not giv­ing up. I won­der if this really will make it to the Supreme Court one day? Whether or not, it’s cer­tainly an inter­est­ing case to follow!

• See also:
• NJTeenDriving’s GDL Decal FAQs
• Licen­cia de con­duc­tor grad­u­ado (GDL)