Chief Justice John Roberts is brilliant and quotable.

That doesn’t necessarily make him right.

Plenty of reports about his majority opinion upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act picked up this pithy gem: “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

It’s a terrific sound bite.

It sounds like judicial restraint — a good thing, especially if you’re a conservative who preaches such a “modest” approach to judging.

What a shock: Smart guys with affluent parents cheat on tests for fun and profit.

It’s true that money can’t buy good morals or respectability. A fancy paycheck and fancier home can’t insulate your children from their own foibles, fallibility and foolish choices.

The makers of the nation’s most-prominent college admissions exams seem to believe that stricter photo ID rules can deter shysters from diminishing the investment made by every student who personally stressed forth their own SAT or ACT scores.

Is banning a few students from wearing U.S. flag T-shirts really the best way to maintain order in a public school?

Really?

That’s what officials at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Calif., insist they were doing last year on Cinco de Mayo.

And now a federal judge has concluded they were not outside First Amendment bounds.

But surely that ruling won’t stand.

And from afar, it seems that the best teachable moments in this controversy have long passed without the right lessons being taught.

How far student speech has come since Mary Beth and John Tinker and Christopher Eckhardt wore black armbands to school in Des Moines to protest the Vietnam War and got suspended as though they were common hooligans.

Now, online-savvy teens get in trouble for rudely mocking their elders on social networking sites, and the ensuing court battles rattle and redefine free-speech boundaries.