Such episodes as a North Carolina grammar school’s much- mocked suspension of a 6-year-old boy for kissing a 6-year-old girl on the cheek, in 1996, may become more commonplace thanks to a well-intentioned but ill-conceived May 24 Supreme Court decision.

Of course, that was not what Justice Sandra Day O’Connor intended when she wrote the 5-4 decision holding that schools (and universities) that receive federal money can be sued for damages for "deliberate indifference" to the need to protect their students from serious harassment.

But sexual harassment lawsuits have proved to be a juggernaut of unforeseen destructive power — helping some victims, but taking a heavy toll on privacy, freedom of expression, and normal human relationships — since the Court authorized them in the workplace 13 years ago.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy may have exaggerated in writing for the four dissenters that the decision, Davis vs. Monroe County Board of Education, would produce a "flood of liability," potentially "crushing" school districts. But even if the liability does not reach flood stage, the ruling could do far more harm than good.

Granted, it will do some good — most immediately by providing a satisfying, if largely symbolic, victory for a young plaintiff whose claims of sexual harassment at school cry out for redress. LaShonda Davis and her mother, Aurelia, claim that while LaShonda was enrolled in the fifth grade at a Georgia elementary school, she was subjected to some eight incidents of sexual harassment over five months. A classmate, they say, grabbed at her breasts and genital area, said things like "I want to touch your boobs," and placed a doorstop in his pants in a sexually suggestive manner. Her teachers and principal allegedly spurned repeated requests to discipline the boy, refusing for three months even to let LaShonda move her assigned classroom seat away from his. Meanwhile, LaShonda had trouble focusing on her studies, and her grades dropped. (She also wrote a suicide note; it’s unclear why.)

If all that is true, as was presumed in the early stages of the case, then LaShonda was a victim of harassment, and the teachers and principal were at fault. But a lawsuit is at best a crude remedy. In Davis’ case, it was too late to stop the harassment, which ended six years ago, when the boy was charged with sexual battery in juvenile court. (He pleaded guilty.) A lawsuit cannot cure whatever psychological harm was done. It can only bring an award of money. And the money — LaShonda claims $500,000 in damages plus her attorneys’ fees, which could take the total above $1 million — would come not from the teachers or the principal, but from the local taxpayers, who did nothing wrong.

Where is the justice in soaking the taxpayers? The answer is that the primary rationale for imposing liability in such cases is not to punish, or even to compensate, but to regulate. The hope is that if schools are threatened with liability, administrators will have an extra incentive to push principals, teachers, and others to be even more vigilant against harassment than they would be otherwise.

Experience suggests that many employers whose workplaces were pervaded by sexism needed a legal incentive to make them do the right thing. But is the same true of teachers and school officials, many of whom are women? They already have powerful incentives to protect their students from sexual harassment and other abuses by other students. These include the need to keep order and pressures from parents whose children complain of mistreatment.

Nobody suggests that we need federal lawsuits to induce schools to prevent schoolyard bullies from beating up smaller kids. What’s so different about harassing girls? Are school administrators as a group so blinded by sexism that they need a judicial kick in the pants to alert them to the dangers of that particular form of bullying? Are teachers and principals — who deal firsthand with the boys and girls involved — less qualified than federal judges and juries to decide when routine flirtations, spats, teasing, and cruelties of student life cross the line into serious harassment?

Justice O’Connor strained mightily to minimize the risk of unwarranted lawsuits. She stressed that a school would be liable only for "deliberate indifference to known acts of harassment in its programs or activities," and then only if the harassment is "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit."

Such limitations on liability would be more reassuring if all judges and jurors were as reasonable as O’Connor. But that’s not the case, and the Kennedy dissent is plausible (if hyperbolic) in warning that "the fence the Court has built is made of little sticks, and it cannot contain the avalanche of liability now set in motion."

As he noted, the O’Connor opinion seems to leave room for a girl to get her lawsuit to a jury trial by pleading little more than "that a boy called her offensive names, that she told a teacher, that the teacher’s response was unreasonable, and that her school performance suffered as a result." In today’s world of runaway damage awards, the prospect of a jury trial is terrifying to almost all prospective defendants.

And allegations of harassment are far from rare. According to a 1993 survey by the American Association of University Women, 80 percent of students said that they had been targets of "some form of sexual harassment" during their school lives. While this figure seems wildly inflated, it at least suggests what schools will be up against if even a tiny fraction of the girls who could complain do complain.

Many school officials are likely to assume that the safest course is to err on the side of discipline, even when the facts of an alleged instance of harassment are disputed, and even when the alleged conduct would strike many of us parents of teenage girls as normal (or, at least, tolerable) adolescent behavior: boys chasing girls at recess, bra-snapping in hallways, blowing kisses, saying "you look nice" in a certain way, and the like.

Ironically, the worst harassers may be the hardest to discipline, because their aberrant conduct can be blamed on the kinds of behavioral disorders that qualify them (under another federal law) as disabled — and entitle them to special protections against school discipline. Whipsawed by clashing legal obligations to those who say they’ve been harassed and the alleged harassers, schools may become more responsive to those parents who seem most likely to sue. Such fear of litigation is unlikely to produce better decisions than would simply relying on the best instincts — and experience — of teachers and principals.

Meanwhile, at the university level, the Court’s decision seems a good bet to energize campus censors. Many administrators, students, and others have already been seeking to establish anti- harassment codes to punish not only sexually inappropriate conduct but also the expression in hallways, classrooms, campus newspapers, and elsewhere of political views deemed offensive by feminists, racial minorities, gays, and some federal education and civil rights bureaucrats. Now the push for censorship will be augmented by the threat of federal lawsuits.

Admittedly, my cost-benefit calculus is subjective, and reasonable people disagree with it. Such disagreements used to be worked out in Congress before potentially vast new liabilities were imposed on local and state governments as a condition of receiving federal funds (as almost all do). But Congress has never voted explicitly (or even implicitly) to unleash lawsuits for student-on-student sexual harassment.

Nobody dreamed that Congress was doing that when it enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law on which the Court rested its decision in Davis. The statute provides that "no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." The main purpose was to protect people from sex discrimination in admissions, employment, and use of federally funded academic and athletic programs. Title IX did not explicitly authorize damage lawsuits at all, let alone lawsuits for sexual harassment — a concept that was, in 1972, unknown to the law.

To be sure, in previous decisions the Justices have unanimously found Title IX’s language broad enough to authorize damage lawsuits against schools that are guilty of deliberate indifference to sexual harassment of students by teachers. But imposing liability for failing to stop student-on-student harassment is a bigger stretch by far.

The Justices’ cure of choice — more lawsuits — is quintessentially American. But in this case, it may be worse than the disease.