Law Commons^™

Randomization And The Fourth Amendment, Bernard Harcourt, Tracey L. Meares

Faculty Scholarship

Randomized checkpoint searches are generally taken to be the exact antithesis of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment. In the eyes of most jurists checkpoint searches violate the central requirement of valid Fourth Amendment searches – namely, individualized suspicion. We disagree. In this Article, we contend that randomized searches should serve as the very lodestar of a reasonable search. The notion of "individualized" suspicion is misleading; most suspicion in the modem policing context is group based and not individual specific. Randomized searches by definition are accompanied by a certain level of suspicion. The constitutional issue, we maintain, should not turn on …