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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Automated Fourth Amendment, Maneka Sinha Jan 2024

The Automated Fourth Amendment, Maneka Sinha

Faculty Scholarship

Courts routinely defer to police officer judgments in reasonable suspicion and probable cause determinations. Increasingly, though, police officers outsource these threshold judgments to new forms of technology that purport to predict and detect crime and identify those responsible. These policing technologies automate core police determinations about whether crime is occurring and who is responsible. Criminal procedure doctrine has failed to insist on some level of scrutiny of—or skepticism about—the reliability of this technology. Through an original study analyzing numerous state and federal court opinions, this Article exposes the implications of law enforcement’s reliance on these practices given the weighty interests …


Cops And Cars: How The Automobile Drove Fourth Amendment Law, Tracey Maclin Dec 2019

Cops And Cars: How The Automobile Drove Fourth Amendment Law, Tracey Maclin

Faculty Scholarship

This is an essay on Professor Sarah A. Seo’s new book, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard Univ. Press 2019). I focus on Professor Seo’s analysis of Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132 (1925) and Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160 (1949). Carroll is important not only because it was the Court’s first car case. Understanding Carroll (and Brinegar, which solidified and expanded Carroll’s holding) is essential because, nearly one hundred years later, its logic continues to direct how the modern Court resolves Fourth Amendment claims of motorists. Put simply, a majority of today’s …


The Fourth Amendment And Surveillance In A Digital World, Arthur Leavens Jan 2015

The Fourth Amendment And Surveillance In A Digital World, Arthur Leavens

Faculty Scholarship

Technology has transformed government surveillance and opened traditionally private information to official scrutiny. The current privacy-based approach to the Fourth Amendment is unable to cope with the changes. This Article offers a solution to the problems that technological surveillance techniques present. Starting with the introduction of the approach in Katz, the Article reviews the development of privacy-based approach. It then looks at three 21st century Supreme Court cases that grappled with applying the Katz test to advanced technological surveillance techniques: Kyllo, Quon, and Jones. These cases demonstrate the problems that the privacy-based approach creates and the …


A Shattered Looking Glass: The Pitfalls And Potential Of The Mosaic Theory Of Fourth Amendment Privacy, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron Jan 2013

A Shattered Looking Glass: The Pitfalls And Potential Of The Mosaic Theory Of Fourth Amendment Privacy, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court issued a landmark non-decision in United States v. Jones. In that case, officers used a GPS-enabled device to track a suspect’s public movements for four weeks, amassing a considerable amount of data in the process. Although ultimately resolved on narrow grounds, five Justices joined concurring opinions in Jones expressing sympathy for some version of the “mosaic theory” of Fourth Amendment privacy. This theory holds that we maintain reasonable expectations of privacy in certain quantities of information even if we do not have such expectations in the constituent parts. This Article examines and …


Tied Up In Knotts? Gps Technology And The Fourth Amendment, Renée Mcdonald Hutchins Jan 2007

Tied Up In Knotts? Gps Technology And The Fourth Amendment, Renée Mcdonald Hutchins

Faculty Scholarship

Judicial and scholarly assessment of emerging technology seems poised to drive the Fourth Amendment down one of three paths. The first would simply relegate the amendment to a footnote in history books by limiting its reach to harms that the framers specifically envisioned. A modified version of this first approach would dispense with expansive constitutional notions of privacy and replace them with legislative fixes. A third path offers the amendment continued vitality but requires the U.S. Supreme Court to overhaul its Fourth Amendment analysis. Fortunately, a fourth alternative is available to cabin emerging technologies within the existing doctrinal framework. Analysis …


Overcoming Hiddenness: The Role Of Intentions In Fourth Amendment Analysis, Daniel B. Yeager Jan 2004

Overcoming Hiddenness: The Role Of Intentions In Fourth Amendment Analysis, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

This Article rehearses a response to the problems posed to and by the Supreme Court's attempts to work out the meaning and operation of the word "search." After commencing Part II by meditating on the notion of privacy, I take up its relation to the antecedent suspicion or knowledge that Fourth-Amendment law requires as a justification for all privacy invasions. From there, I look specifically at that uneasy relation in Supreme Court jurisprudence, which has come to privilege privacy over property as a Fourth Amendment value. From there, Part III reviews the sources or bases that can tell us what …


Stubbornness Of Pretexts, Daniel B. Yeager Jan 2003

Stubbornness Of Pretexts, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

This Article will reflect on (1) how the Whren v. United States failure to acknowledge what counts as a pretext accounts for the residual confusion as to whether or not Whren really has killed off the pretext argument in constitutional criminal procedure, and (2) the extent to which the Court in Sullivan compounded that failure, which I hope to lightly correct here by distinguishing motives from intentions and then by elaborating the role that each plays, or at least should play, in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.


Does Privacy Really Have A Problem In The Law Of Criminal Procedure?, Daniel B. Yeager Jan 1997

Does Privacy Really Have A Problem In The Law Of Criminal Procedure?, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

Agreeing with William Stuntz's conclusion that privacy retains a significant position in the law of criminal procedure, the author defends a privacy-oriented procedural regime that can .be reconciled with an activist regulatory state. Part One of this Article suggests that the comparatively light judicial supervision of police coercion owes more to the conditions under which force is used than to what Stuntz views as the Court's indifference to what police do to us, or to its "obsession" over what police can see and hear. By redescribing questions of privacy, or questions of privacy and coercion, merely as questions of coercion, …