Law Commons^™

Networking Customary Law, Scott Sullivan

Journal Articles

In United States v. Jones, the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether gathering four weeks of GPS information capturing a suspect’s movement on public roads constituted an unlawful search under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

In two separate concurring opinions, Justices Alito and Sotomayor rejected the notion that all of a citizen’s movements in public were free from the Amendment’s protection. A unifying theme for both justices was the power of contemporary technology to aggregate isolated acts into a comprehensive knowledge of a person’s private life. Justice Alito writing on behalf of four Justices notes that, over time, the …