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Carpenter V. United States And The Fourth Amendment: The Best Way Forward, Stephen E. Henderson Dec 2017

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

Stephen E Henderson

We finally have a federal ‘test case.’  In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court is poised to set the direction of the Fourth Amendment in the digital age.  The case squarely presents how the twentieth-century third party doctrine will fare in contemporary times, and the stakes could not be higher.  This Article reviews the Carpenter case and how it fits within the greater discussion of the Fourth Amendment third party doctrine and location surveillance, and I express a hope that the Court will be both a bit ambitious and a good measure cautious. 
 
As for ambition, the …


Keeping The Government's Hands Off Our Bodies: Mapping A Feminist Legal Theory Approach To Privacy In Cross-Gender Prison Searches, Teresa A. Miller Nov 2017

Keeping The Government's Hands Off Our Bodies: Mapping A Feminist Legal Theory Approach To Privacy In Cross-Gender Prison Searches, Teresa A. Miller

Teresa A. Miller

The power of privacy is diminishing in the prison setting, and yet privacy is the legal theory prisoners rely upon most to resist searches by correctional officers. Incarcerated women in particular rely upon privacy to shield them from the kind of physical contact that male guards have been known to abuse. The kind of privacy that protects prisoners from searches by guards of the opposite sex derives from several sources, depending on the factual circumstances. Although some form of bodily privacy is embodied in the First, Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments, prisoners challenging the constitutionality of cross-gender searches most commonly …


Sex & Surveillance: Gender, Privacy & The Sexualization Of Power In Prison, Teresa A. Miller Nov 2017

Sex & Surveillance: Gender, Privacy & The Sexualization Of Power In Prison, Teresa A. Miller

Teresa A. Miller

In prison, surveillance is power and power is sexualized. Sex and surveillance, therefore, are profoundly linked. Whereas numerous penal scholars from Bentham to Foucault have theorized the force inherent in the visual monitoring of prisoners, the sexualization of power and the relationship between sex and surveillance is more academically obscure. This article criticizes the failure of federal courts to consider the strong and complex relationship between sex and surveillance in analyzing the constitutionality of prison searches, specifically, cross-gender searches. The analysis proceeds in four parts. Part One introduces the issues posed by sex and surveillance. Part Two describes the sexually …


Law Enforcement And Criminal Law Decisions, Erwin Chemerinsky Jun 2017

Law Enforcement And Criminal Law Decisions, Erwin Chemerinsky

Erwin Chemerinsky

No abstract provided.


Testimony On Unmanned Aircraft Systems Rules And Regulations, Stephen E. Henderson Sep 2016

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

Stephen E Henderson

Chairman Barrington, Vice Chair Brooks, members of the Committee on Public Safety, Senators, and distinguished guests, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today about unmanned aerial systems, or drones, and more particularly about their federal constitutional implications and what might be the constitutional restrictions on any legislation you might like to enact. I am the Judge Haskell A. Holloman Professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma, where my teaching and research focus on criminal law and procedure and privacy, including the constitutional rights pertaining thereto.

My topic is not an easy one. The constitutional law …


Ou Professor: Fourth Amendment At Heart Of Dispute Between Fbi, Apple, Stephen E. Henderson Mar 2016

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

Stephen E Henderson

The dispute between the FBI and Apple Inc. over the unlocking of the iPhone used by one of the San Bernadino shooters is important to all Americans. And so it's good that it is getting a wide airing. But when it comes to issues that have complicated tradeoffs, it can be important not just that we have the conversation, but that we use the right words. And here the debate deserves very mixed reviews. . . .


Lawn Signs: A Fourth Amendment For Constitutional Curmudgeons, Stephen E. Henderson, Andrew G. Ferguson Dec 2015

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

Stephen E Henderson

What is the constitutional significance of the proverbial “keep off the grass” sign?  This question—asked by curmudgeonly neighbors everywhere—has been given new currency in a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court.  Indeed, Florida v. Jardines might have bestowed constitutional curmudgeons with significant new Fourth Amendment protections.  By expressing expectations regarding—and control over—access to property, “the people” may be able to claim greater Fourth Amendment protections not only for their homes, but also for their persons, papers, and effects.  This article launches a constitutionally grounded, but lighthearted campaign of citizen education and empowerment: Fourth Amendment LAWn signs.  With every …


A Rose By Any Other Name: Regulating Law Enforcement Bulk Metadata Collection, Stephen E. Henderson Dec 2015

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

Stephen E Henderson

In Other People’s Papers, Jane Bambauer argues for careful reform of the Fourth Amendment’s third party doctrine, providing an important contribution to an increasingly rich field of scholarship, judicial opinion, statute, and law reform.  Bambauer is especially concerned with access to bodies of third-party data that can be filtered and mined, as they can be privacy invasive but also effective and less subject to traditional investigative prejudices and limitations.  Although her article provocatively overclaims in trying to set itself apart from existing proposals, by analyzing existing constitutional and statutory law—including what I have termed a “limited” third party doctrine—and comparing …


Fourth Amendment Time Machines (And What They Might Say About Police Body Cameras), Stephen E. Henderson Dec 2015

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

Stephen E Henderson

When it comes to criminal investigation, time travel is increasingly possible.  Despite longstanding roots in traditional investigation, science is today providing something fundamentally different in the form of remarkably complete digital records.  And those big data records not only store our past, but thanks to data mining they are in many circumstances eerily good at predicting our future.  So, now that we stand on the threshold of investigatory time travel, how should the Fourth Amendment and legislation respond?  How should we approach bulk government capture, such as by a solar-powered drone employing wide-area persistent stare technology?  Is it meaningfully different …


Searches, Seizures And Drug Testing Procedures: Balancing Rights And School Safety, 1st Edition, Ralph Mawdsley, Charles Russo Feb 2015

Searches, Seizures And Drug Testing Procedures: Balancing Rights And School Safety, 1st Edition, Ralph Mawdsley, Charles Russo

Charles J. Russo

No abstract provided.


Searches, Seizures And Drug Testing Procedures: Balancing Rights And School Safety, Second Edition, Ralph Mawdsley, Charles Russo Feb 2015

Searches, Seizures And Drug Testing Procedures: Balancing Rights And School Safety, Second Edition, Ralph Mawdsley, Charles Russo

Charles J. Russo

This authoritative resource examines reasonable student and employee searches and seizures — along with proper drug-testing protocol. Practical recommendations and working guidelines provide essential benchmarks for balancing student and employee privacy rights with school safety — to help you:

  • Understand the implications of — and methods available for — searching personal property and employees' computers
  • Create legally sound drug-testing policies
  • Know what constitutes permissible student and staff searches — and what doesn't
  • And more!


Regulating Drones Under The First And Fourth Amendments, Stephen E. Henderson, Joseph Thai, Marc Jonathan Blitz, James Grimsley Dec 2014

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 …


What Is A Search? Two Conceptual Flaws In Fourth Amendment Doctine And Some Hints Of A Remedy, Sherry F. Colb Dec 2014

What Is A Search? Two Conceptual Flaws In Fourth Amendment Doctine And Some Hints Of A Remedy, Sherry F. Colb

Sherry Colb

No abstract provided.


Constitutional Trespass, Laurent Sacharoff Dec 2013

Constitutional Trespass, Laurent Sacharoff

Laurent Sacharoff

The Supreme Court has recently created a trespass test for Fourth Amendment searches without explaining what type of trespass it envisions—one based on the common law of 1791, on the specific trespass law of the state where the search occurred, or on some other trespass principles. Indeed Florida v. Jardines, decided in 2013, raises the question whether the Court has created a trespass test at all, a seeming turnabout that largely recapitulates the Court’s 125- year history of confusion in which it has embraced, rejected, or simply ignored trespass as a test from era to era or even year to …


Speech Engines, James Grimmelmann Dec 2013

Speech Engines, James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann

Academic and regulatory debates about Google are dominated by two opposing theories of what search engines are and how law should treat them. Some describe search engines as passive, neutral conduits for websites’ speech; others describe them as active, opinionated editors: speakers in their own right. The conduit and editor theories give dramatically different policy prescriptions in areas ranging from antitrust to copyright. But they both systematically discount search users’ agency, regarding users merely as passive audiences.

A better theory is that search engines are not primarily conduits or editors, but advisors. They help users achieve their diverse and individualized …


The "Not A Search" Game, John F. Stinneford Dec 2013

The "Not A Search" Game, John F. Stinneford

John F. Stinneford

No abstract provided.


Our Records Panopticon And The American Bar Association Standards For Criminal Justice, Stephen E. Henderson Dec 2013

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 Dec 2013

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 …


The Davis Good Faith Rule And Getting Answers To The Questions Jones Left Open, Susan Freiwald Dec 2012

The Davis Good Faith Rule And Getting Answers To The Questions Jones Left Open, Susan Freiwald

Susan Freiwald

The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Jones clearly established that use of GPS tracking surveillance constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. But the Court left many other questions unanswered about the nature and scope of the constitutional privacy right in location data. A review of lower court decisions in the wake of Jones reveals that, rather than begin to answer the questions that Jones left open, courts are largely avoiding substantive Fourth Amendment analysis of location data privacy. Instead, they are finding that officers who engaged in GPS tracking and related surveillance operated in good faith, based …


American Bar Association Criminal Justice Standards On Law Enforcement Access To Third Party Records, Stephen E. Henderson Dec 2012

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

Stephen E Henderson

Drafted over the past six years and adopted by the American Bar Association (ABA) House of Delegates in February, 2012, these Criminal Justice Standards on Law Enforcement Access to Third Party Records provide much needed guidance to legislatures, courts, and administrative agencies having to decide how to regulate law enforcement access to existing records in the hands of third parties. It is the first framework of its kind, and it can do much to improve the current system of ad hoc protections in both state and federal systems. Decision makers are struggling to determine when to permit law enforcement access …


Search, Seizure, And Immunity: Second-Order Normative Authority And Rights, Stephen E. Henderson, Kelly Sorensen Dec 2012

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 Dec 2012

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 Dec 2012

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 Dec 2012

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 …


Expectations Of Privacy In Social Media, Stephen E. Henderson Dec 2011

Expectations Of Privacy In Social Media, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

This article, which largely tracks my remarks at Mississippi College’s Social Media Symposium, examines expectations of privacy in social media such as weblogs (blogs), Facebook pages, and Twitter tweets. Social media is diverse and ever-diversifying, and while I address some of that complexity, I focus on the core functionality, which provides the groundwork for further conversation as the technology and related social norms develop. As one would expect, just as with our offline communications and other online communications, in some we have an expectation of privacy that is recognized by current law, in some we have an expectation of privacy …


Some Skepticism About Search Neutrality, James Grimmelmann Dec 2009

Some Skepticism About Search Neutrality, James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann

In the last few years, some search-engine critics have suggested that dominant search engines (i.e. Google) should be subject to “search neutrality” regulations. By analogy to network neutrality, search neutrality would require even-handed treatment in search results: It would prevent search engines from playing favorites among websites. Academics, Google competitors, and public-interest groups have all embraced search neutrality.

Despite this sudden interest, the case for search neutrality is too muddled to be convincing. While “neutrality” is an appealing-sounding principle, it lacks a clear definition. This essay explores no fewer than eight different meanings that search-neutrality advocates have given the term. …


Step Out Of The Car: License, Registration, And Dna Please, Brian Gallini Dec 2008

Step Out Of The Car: License, Registration, And Dna Please, Brian Gallini

Brian Gallini

No Arkansas appellate court has examined the constitutionality of the recently enacted House Bill 1473 – better known as “Juli’s Law” – which allows officers to take DNA samples from suspects arrested for capital murder, murder in the first degree, kidnapping, sexual assault in the first degree, and sexual assault in the second degree. This Essay contends that Juli’s Law violates the Fourth Amendment of the federal constitution. Part I highlights certain features of the statute and explores the rationale underlying its enactment. Part II discusses the only published decision upholding the practice of taking of DNA samples from certain …


Originalism & Early Civil Search Statutes: Searches & The Misunderstood History Of Suspicion & Probable Cause, Fabio Arcila Mar 2008

Originalism & Early Civil Search Statutes: Searches & The Misunderstood History Of Suspicion & Probable Cause, Fabio Arcila

Fabio Arcila Jr.

Originalist analyses of the Framers’ views about governmental search power have devoted insufficient attention to the civil search statutes they promulgated. What attention has been paid, primarily as part of what I term the “conventional account,” has it that the Framers were divided about how accessible search remedies should be. This article explains why this conventional account is mostly wrong, and explores the lessons to be learned from the statutory choices the Framers made with regard to search and seizure law.

In enacting civil search statutes, the Framers chose to depart from common law standards and instead largely followed the …


Originalism & Early Civil Search Statutes: The Misunderstood History Of Suspicion & Probable Cause, Fabio Arcila, Jr. Dec 2006

Originalism & Early Civil Search Statutes: The Misunderstood History Of Suspicion & Probable Cause, Fabio Arcila, Jr.

Fabio Arcila Jr.

Originalist analyses of the Framers’ views about governmental search power have devoted insufficient attention to the civil search statutes they promulgated. What attention has been paid, primarily as part of what I term the “conventional account,” has it that the Framers were divided about how accessible search remedies should be. This article explains why this conventional account is mostly wrong, and explores the lessons to be learned from the statutory choices the Framers made with regard to search and seizure law.

In enacting civil search statutes, the Framers chose to depart from common law standards and instead largely followed the …


The Structure Of Search Engine Law, James Grimmelmann Dec 2006

The Structure Of Search Engine Law, James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann

This Article provides a road map to issues of search engine law. It indicates what questions we must consider when thinking about search engines, and it indicates the interconnections among those questions. It does not endorse any particular normative framework for search. Nor does it recommend who should regulate search. Instead, it provides the necessary foundation for informed decision-making, by whatever regulator and whatever its normative approach.

Part I will explain how modern search engines function and describe the business environment within which they operate. Search engine operations can be understood in terms of the information flows among four principal …