Law Commons^™

Heien'S Mistake Of Law, Kit Kinports

Kit Kinports

The Supreme Court has been whittling away at the Fourth Amendment for decades. The Court's 2014 ruling in Heien v. North Carolina allowing the police to make a traffic stop based on a reasonable mistake of law generated little controversy among the Justices and escaped largely unnoticed by the press-perhaps because yet another Supreme Court decision reading the Fourth Amendment narrowly is not especially noteworthy or because the opinion's cursory and overly simplistic analysis equating law enforcement's reasonable mistakes of fact and law minimized the significance of the Court's decision. But the temptation to dismiss Heien as just another small …

Carpenter V. United States And The Fourth Amendment: The Best Way Forward, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

A Few Criminal Justice Big Data Rules, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

Testimony On Unmanned Aircraft Systems Rules And Regulations, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

If You Fly A Drone, So Can Police, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

Ou Professor: Fourth Amendment At Heart Of Dispute Between Fbi, Apple, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

Machine Learning, Automated Suspicion Algorithms, And The Fourth Amendment, Michael L. Rich

Michael L Rich

At the conceptual intersection of machine learning and government data collection lie Automated Suspicion Algorithms, or ASAs, algorithms created through the application of machine learning methods to collections of government data with the purpose of identifying individuals likely to be engaged in criminal activity. The novel promise of ASAs is that they can identify data-supported correlations between innocent conduct and criminal activity and help police prevent crime. ASAs present a novel doctrinal challenge, as well, as they intrude on a step of the Fourth Amendment’s individualized suspicion analysis previously the sole province of human actors: the determination of when reasonable …

Lawn Signs: A Fourth Amendment For Constitutional Curmudgeons, Stephen E. Henderson, Andrew G. Ferguson

Stephen E Henderson

A Rose By Any Other Name: Regulating Law Enforcement Bulk Metadata Collection, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

Fourth Amendment Time Machines (And What They Might Say About Police Body Cameras), Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

The Right To A Fair Trial In The Age Of Facebook, Lori Andrews

Lori B. Andrews

No abstract provided.

Regulating Drones Under The First And Fourth Amendments, Stephen E. Henderson, Joseph Thai, Marc Jonathan Blitz, James Grimsley

Stephen E Henderson

The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 requires the Federal Aviation Administration to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, into the national airspace system by September of this year. Yet perhaps because of their chilling accuracy in targeted killings abroad, perhaps because of an increasing consciousness of diminishing privacy more generally, and perhaps simply because of a fear of the unknown, divergent UAV-restrictive legislation has been proposed in Congress and enacted in a number of states. Ultimately, given UAV utility and cost effectiveness over a vast range of tasks, widespread commercial use seems certain. So it is imperative …

City Of Los Angeles V. Patel: The Upcoming Supreme Court Case No One Is Talking About, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

Focusing solely on whether a hotel owner has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a guest registry is akin to asking whether Verizon Wireless has a reasonable expectation of privacy in its customer lists. The answer to those questions should be yes, but the sixty-four thousand dollar question—and the proverbial elephant in the room—is whether hotel occupants and cell phone users forfeit their privacy rights simply because they check into the Beverly Hills Hotel or call their significant others from a Smart Phone on the Santa Monica Freeway. Put differently, a hotel owner’s expectation of privacy in a guest registry …

The Internet Is The New Public Forum: Why Riley V. California Supports Net Neutrality, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

Technology has ushered civil liberties into the virtual world, and the law must adapt by providing legal protections to individuals who speak, assemble, and associate in that world. The original purposes of the First Amendment, which from time immemorial have protected civil liberties and preserved the free, open, and robust exchange of information, support net neutrality. After all, laws or practices that violate cherished freedoms in the physical world also violate those freedoms in the virtual world. The battle over net neutrality is “is absolutely the First Amendment issue of our time,” just as warrantless searches of cell phones were …

Riley V. California: Privacy Still Matters, But How Much And In What Contexts?, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

Private information is no longer stored only in homes or other areas traditionally protected from warrantless intrusion. The private lives of many citizens are contained in digital devices no larger than the palm of their hand—and carried in public places. But that does not make the data within a cell phone any less private, just as the dialing of a phone number does not voluntarily waive an individual’s right to keep their call log or location private. Remember that we are not talking exclusively about individuals suspected of committing violent crimes. The Government is recording the calls and locations of …

Riley V. California: What It Means For Metadata, Border Searches, And The Future Of Privacy, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

Private information is no longer stored only in homes or other areas traditionally protected from warrantless intrusion. The private lives of many citizens are contained in a digital device no larger than the palm of their hand—and carried in public places. But that does not make the data within a cell phone any less private, just as the dialing of a phone number does not voluntarily waive an individual’s right to keep their call log or location private. Remember that we are not talking about individuals suspected of committing violent crimes. The Government is recording the calls and locations of …

Brief Of Amici Curiae -- Heien V. State Of North Carolina, Charles E. Maclean, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

Reasonable suspicion of unlawful activity cannot be predicated on conduct that does not violate the law. Put differently, if reasonableness — or reasonable suspicion — is to mean anything, it means that apparent violations of the law must be based on actual violations of the law. The North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision sends a message to drivers throughout the country that they cannot be wrong about what the law requires, even where law enforcement is wrong — dead wrong — about what the law proscribes.

Back To The Future: The Constitution Requires Reasonableness And Particularity—Introducing The “Seize But Don’T Search” Doctrine, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

Issuing one-hundred or fewer opinions per year, the United States Supreme Court cannot keep pace with opinions that match technological advancement. As a result, in Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie, the Court needs to announce a broader principle that protects privacy in the digital age. That principle, what we call “seize but don’t search,” recognizes that the constitutional touchstone for all searches is reasonableness.

When do present-day circumstances—the evolution in the Government’s surveillance capabilities, citizens’ phone habits, and the relationship between the NSA and telecom companies—become so thoroughly unlike those considered by the Supreme Court thirty-four years …

Orwellian Surveillance Of Vehicular Travels, Sam Hanna

Sam Hanna

What would someone learn about you if all your automobile travels were ubiquitously tracked beginning today? Creating an indefinite database of a person’s previous automobile travels to formulate deductions on intimate details of people's lives is precisely what law enforcement agencies are currently able to accomplish with automatic license plate recognition (“ALPR”). With the ubiquity of ALPR cameras, continuous government surveillance of automobile travels is no longer a figment of the imagination. Consequently, the judicial and legislative branches of government must embark on balancing the private and public interests implicated by this technology. Failure to set suitable boundaries around the …

Our Records Panopticon And The American Bar Association Standards For Criminal Justice, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

"Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft." So concludes the main character in Dave Egger’s novel The Circle, in which a single company that unites Google, Facebook, and Twitter – and on steroids – has the ambition not only to know, but also to share, all of the world's information. It is telling that a current dystopian novel features not the government in the first instance, but instead a private third party that, through no act of overt coercion, knows so much about us. This is indeed the greatest risk to privacy in our day, both the unprecedented …

Reforming The Grand Jury To Protect Privacy In Third Party Records, Stephen E. Henderson, Andrew E. Taslitz

Stephen E Henderson

In late 2014, two grand juries returned controversial no bill decisions in police killings, one in Ferguson, Missouri, and one in New York City. These outcomes have renewed calls for grand jury reform, and whatever one thinks of these particular processes and outcomes, such reform is long overdue. One logical source of reform to better respect privacy in records, which would have incidental benefits beyond this privacy focus, would be the newly enacted American Bar Association Standards for Criminal Justice on Law Enforcement Access to Third Party Records (LEATPR).

But LEATPR exempts from its requirements access to records via a …

Who Should Be The ‘Decider’ On Keeping Our Secrets?, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

Amicus Brief: State V. Glover (Maine Supreme Judicial Court), Adam Lamparello, Charles Maclean

Adam Lamparello

When law enforcement seeks to obtain a warrantless, pre-arrest DNA sample from an individual, that individual has the right to say “No.” If silence is to become a “badge of guilt,” then the right to silence—under the United States and Maine Constitutions—might become a thing of the past. Allowing jurors to infer consciousness of guilt from a pre-arrest DNA sample violates the Fourth Amendment to the United States and Maine Constitutions.

American Bar Association Criminal Justice Standards On Law Enforcement Access To Third Party Records, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

Search, Seizure, And Immunity: Second-Order Normative Authority And Rights, Stephen E. Henderson, Kelly Sorensen

Stephen E Henderson

A paradigmatic aspect of a paradigmatic kind of right is that the rights holder is the only one who can alienate it. When individuals waive rights, the normative source of that waiving is normally taken to be the individual herself. This moral feature—immunity—is usually in the background of discussions about rights. We bring it into the foreground here, with specific attention to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Kentucky v. King (2011), concerning search and seizure rights. An entailment of the Court’s decision is that, at least in some cases, a right can be removed by the intentional actions of …

Real-Time And Historic Location Surveillance After United States V. Jones: An Administrable, Mildly Mosaic Approach, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

In United States v. Jones, the government took an extreme position: so far as the federal Constitution is concerned, law enforcement can surreptitiously electronically track the movements of any American over the course of an entire month without cause or restraint. According to the government, whether the surveillance be for good reason, invidious reason, or no reason, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated. Fortunately, that position was unanimously rejected by the High Court. The Court did not, however, resolve what restriction or restraint the Fourth Amendment places upon location surveillance, reflecting a proper judicial restraint in this nuanced and difficult …

After United States V. Jones, After The Fourth Amendment Third Party Doctrine, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the proposition that the Government can surreptitiously electronically track vehicle location for an entire month without Fourth Amendment restraint. While the Court's three opinions leave much uncertain, in one perspective they fit nicely within a long string of cases in which the Court is cautiously developing new standards of Fourth Amendment protection, including a rejection of a strong third party doctrine. This Article develops that perspective and provides a cautiously optimistic view of where search and seizure protections may be headed.

More detail:

United States v. Jones, in which the …

What Alex Kozinski And The Investigation Of Earl Bradley Teach About Searching And Seizing Computers And The Dangers Of Inevitable Discovery, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

This paper tells two stories. One concerns the investigation of a Delaware physician named Earl B. Bradley that resulted in a conviction and sentence of fourteen consecutive life terms for the sexual abuse of children. The other concerns the computer problems, both judicial and extra-judicial, of Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Though in a sense unrelated, they share lessons about the practicalities of computers and their search that are worth telling. As courts continue to struggle with how to cabin the searches of computers in order to minimize privacy intrusion …

The Problem Of Policing, Rachel A. Harmon

Rachel A. Harmon

The legal problem of policing is how to regulate police authority to permit officers to enforce law while also protecting individual liberty and minimizing the social costs the police impose. Courts and commentators have largely treated the problem of policing as limited to preventing violations of constitutional rights and its solution as the judicial definition and enforcement of those rights. But constitutional law and courts alone are necessarily inadequate to regulate the police. Constitutional law does not protect important interests below the constitutional threshold or effectively address the distributional impacts of law enforcement activities. Nor can the judiciary adequately assess …

Memorandum Fourth Amendment Warrantless Search Consent Exception & Request For New Trial, Rosi Lehr

Rosi Lehr

The court correctly held the roommate’s consent was a valid exception to the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment because he has common authority and voluntarily consented. The district court correctly held the Judge’s response to the Jury’s question was not improper because he has broad discretion when responding to a jury’s request. Harmless error is error that does not affect the outcome of the case and may be found when the defendant cannot show the case was prejudiced by the Judge’s response