Every now and then someone says something that makes you want to stand up and shout, Amen! One such moment came at a recent federal court hearing on a lawsuit over kids wearing T-shirts in school -- yes, a federal case over kids wearing T-shirts in school -- when Judge Richard Posner declared, "Why do people bring lawsuits over such trivialities?" While that was not necessarily a sign of how the court will ultimately rule, Posner's observation packed plenty of common sense.

The gist of the lawsuit is this: Back in 2003 the Beaubien School on the Far Northwest Side serving gifted and regular students held an election to select an eighth-grade T-shirt. The design by the gifted students lost, school officials said, but they did not release the vote count. The kids grouched that the officials fixed the results because they didn't like the design. The "gifties," as they call themselves, made T-shirts anyway and wore them to school; principal Chris Kotis imposed disciplinary measures such as confining them to one classroom for two weeks and depriving them of science and computer labs and after-school programs. Lawyers for the Chicago Public Schools say the T-shirts could stir up trouble among the regular students. Kotis has banned the use in the school of the words "gifties" and "tards," the latter directed at regular students.

One of the gifted kids has a mother for a lawyer, so perhaps a lawsuit was inevitable. It claimed First Amendment rights for children that don't exist and demanded damages from the school district and expungement of the disciplinary measures from the students' records. The students lost their case in U.S. District Court and the lawyer-mom appealed. So now the case is before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, on which Posner sits.

The Institute of Legal Reform of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce polled voters in the Nov. 7 election and found 85 percent of them think the number of frivolous lawsuits is a serious problem. Admittedly, this comes from an interest group that gripes constantly about lawsuits, but there's little reason to doubt the results reflect public sentiment, no matter how much bar groups say the issue is blown out of proportion. It's cases like this lawsuit and the infamous one last year over a lost iPod that fuel the perception of courts clogged with frivolous litigation.

The Chicago school district and the kids' parents should stop this silliness now. They should sit down and hammer out a settlement, perhaps dropping the suit and the demand for damages in exchange for the school ameliorating to a significant degree the disciplinary record.

One of the kids is quoted as saying, "If we stop now, it'll be four years of nothing." We've got news for him: Most of us think it's already been four years of nothing.