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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Broken Fourth Amendment Oath, Laurent Sacharoff
The Broken Fourth Amendment Oath, Laurent Sacharoff
Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship
The Fourth Amendment requires that warrants be supported by “Oath or affirmation.” Under current doctrine, a police officer may swear the oath to obtain a warrant merely by repeating the account of an informant. This Article shows, however, that the Fourth Amendment, as originally understood, required that the real accuser with personal knowledge swear the oath.
That real-accuser requirement persisted for nearly two centuries. Almost all federal courts and most state courts from 1850 to 1960 held that the oath, by its very nature, required a witness with personal knowledge. Only in 1960 did the Supreme Court hold in Jones …
Criminal Trespass And Computer Crime, Laurent Sacharoff
Criminal Trespass And Computer Crime, Laurent Sacharoff
Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) criminalizes the simple act of trespass upon a computer—intentional access without authorization. The law sweeps too broadly, but the courts and scholars seeking to fix it look in the wrong place. They uniformly focus on the term “without authorization” when instead they should focus on the statute’s mens rea. On a conceptual level, courts and scholars understand that the CFAA is a criminal law, of course, but fail to interpret it comprehensively as one.
This Article begins the first sustained treatment of the CFAA as a criminal law, with a full elaboration of …
Who Should Own Police Body Camera Videos?, Laurent Sacharoff, Sarah Lustbader
Who Should Own Police Body Camera Videos?, Laurent Sacharoff, Sarah Lustbader
Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship
Numerous cities, states, and localities have adopted police body camera programs to enhance police accountability in the wake of repeated instances of police misconduct, as well as recent reports of more deep-seated police problems. These body camera programs hold great promise to achieve accountability, often backed by millions of dollars of federal grants.
But so far, this promise of accountability has gone largely unrealized, in part because police departments exercise near-total control over body camera programs and the videos themselves. In fact, the police view these programs chiefly as a tool of ordinary law enforcement rather than accountability — as …