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Full-Text Articles in Law

Computationally Assessing Suspicion, Wesley M. Oliver May 2024

Computationally Assessing Suspicion, Wesley M. Oliver

Law Faculty Publications

Law enforcement officers performing drug interdiction on interstate highways have to decide nearly every day whether there is reasonable suspicion to detain motorists until a trained dog can sniff for the presence of drugs. The officers’ assessments are often wrong, however, and lead to unnecessary detentions of innocent persons and the suppression of drugs found on guilty ones. We propose a computational method of evaluating suspicion in these encounters and offer experimental results from early efforts demonstrating its feasibility. With the assistance of large language and predictive machine learning models, it appears that judges, advocates, and even police officers could …


The Mosaic Theory In Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence: The Last Bastion Of Privacy In A Camera-Surveilled World, Auggie Alvarado Apr 2024

The Mosaic Theory In Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence: The Last Bastion Of Privacy In A Camera-Surveilled World, Auggie Alvarado

St. Mary's Law Journal

No abstract provided.


The Post-Dobbs Reality: Privacy Expectations For Period-Tracking Apps In Criminal Abortion Prosecutions, Sophie L. Nelson Apr 2024

The Post-Dobbs Reality: Privacy Expectations For Period-Tracking Apps In Criminal Abortion Prosecutions, Sophie L. Nelson

Pepperdine Law Review

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in June 2022 was met with waves of both support and criticism throughout the United States. Several states immediately implemented or began drafting trigger laws that criminalize seeking and providing an abortion. These laws prompted several period-tracking app companies to encrypt their users’ data to make it more difficult for the government to access period- and pregnancy-related information for criminal investigations. This Comment explores whether the Fourth Amendment and U.S. privacy statutes protect users of period-tracking apps from government surveillance. More specifically, this Comment argues that …


Pretrial Commitment And The Fourth Amendment, Laurent Sacharoff Apr 2024

Pretrial Commitment And The Fourth Amendment, Laurent Sacharoff

Notre Dame Law Review

Today, the Fourth Amendment Warrant Clause governs arrest warrants and search warrants only. But in the founding era, the Warrant Clause governed a third type of warrant: the “warrant of commitment.” Judges issued these warrants to jail defendants pending trial. This Article argues that the Fourth Amendment Warrant Clause, with its oath and probable cause standard, should be understood today to apply to this third type of warrant. That means the Warrant Clause would govern any initial appearance where a judge first commits a defendant—a process that currently falls far short of fulfilling its constitutional and historical function. History supports …


The Unconstitutional Conditions Vacuum In Criminal Procedure, Kay L. Levine, Jonathan R. Nash, Robert A. Schapiro Jan 2024

The Unconstitutional Conditions Vacuum In Criminal Procedure, Kay L. Levine, Jonathan R. Nash, Robert A. Schapiro

Faculty Articles

For more than a century, the Supreme Court has applied the unconstitutional conditions doctrine in many contexts, scrutinizing government efforts to condition the tradeoff of rights for benefits with regard to speech, funding, and takings, among others. The Court has declined, however, to invoke the doctrine in the area of criminal procedure, where people accused of crime are often asked to—and often do—surrender their constitutional rights under the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments in return for some benefit. Despite its insistence that the unconstitutional conditions doctrine applies broadly across the Bill of Rights, the Court’s jurisprudence demonstrates that the doctrine …


The Modern Border: The Government Can Search . . . Anything?, Abigail Nusbaum Jan 2024

The Modern Border: The Government Can Search . . . Anything?, Abigail Nusbaum

FIU Law Review

The evolution of modern technology has introduced new obstacles in interpreting the Fourth Amendment’s application to searches of peoples’ effects. Specifically, the longstanding exception to the Fourth Amendment permitting searches at the international border in the absence of probable cause does not so neatly apply to forensic searches of cell phones. Consequently, a circuit split has emerged on two aspects of the issue: the scope of the border exception and the requisite level of suspicion within that exception. The Supreme Court should find that forensic cell phone searches at the international border implicate Fourth Amendment privacy interests, requiring the border …