In most legal rulings, even a casual observer can see reasonable arguments on both sides. This is not surprising. If both sides didn't have reasonable arguments, there wouldn't be a dispute to begin with, or any need for a ruling. But a decision handed down by Britain's Law Lords last week backing a British school's refusal to let a female student wear full Islamic dress in class served as a reminder that sometimes one side really has no case at all, no matter how many lawyers it hires to manufacture one.

Shabina Begum, now 17, had won an appeal in a lower court last year establishing that her high school in Luton, north of London, had infringed on her "human rights" in 2002 by not allowing her to wear the jilbab, a full-length costume that covers everything but the face and hands. Up until then, Ms. Begum had worn the less capacious tunic and trousers known as the shalwar kameez, but she said, as she matured physically, that wasn't sufficiently modest.

The Times last month published a commentary by a British lawyer in which he said the jilbab case raised "fundamental questions about the religious rights of the individual and the interests of the community." That phrasing overstated the matter, casting it more or less as a momentous clash of equal principles. In reality, the dispute was not particularly momentous: It was simply about a school's right to enforce a dress code versus an individual's right to object to it. And those rights are not equal. What is much clearer is the individual's right to find another school if he or she doesn't like the dress code, as Ms. Begum eventually did.