Fourth Amendment Commons^™

Wrong Or (Fundamental) Right?: Substantive Due Process And The Right To Exclude, Jack May

Washington Law Review

Substantive due process provides heightened protection from government interference with enumerated constitutional rights and unenumerated—but nevertheless “fundamental”—rights. To date, the United States Supreme Court has never recognized any property right as a fundamental right for substantive due process purposes. But in Yim v. City of Seattle, a case recently decided by the Ninth Circuit, landlords and tenant screening companies argued that the right to exclude from one’s property should be a fundamental right. Yim involved a challenge to Seattle’s Fair Chance Housing Ordinance, which, among other things, prohibits landlords and tenant screening companies from inquiring about or considering a …

Private Police Regulation And The Exclusionary Remedy: How Washington Can Eliminate The Public/Private Distinction, Jared Rothenberg

Washington Law Review

Private security forces such as campus police, security guards, loss prevention officers, and the like are not state actors covered by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures nor the Fifth Amendment’s Miranda protections. As members of the umbrella category of “private police,” these private law enforcement agents often obtain evidence, detain individuals, and elicit confessions in a manner that government actors cannot, which can then be lawfully turned over to the government. Though the same statutory law governing private citizens (assault, false imprisonment, trespass, etc.) also regulates private police conduct, private police conduct is not bound by …

Reasonable In Time, Unreasonable In Scope: Maximizing Fourth Amendment Protections Under Rodriguez V. United States, Thomas Heiden

Washington Law Review

In Rodriguez v. United States, the Supreme Court held that a law enforcement officer may not conduct a drug dog sniff after the completion of a routine traffic stop because doing so extends the stop without reasonable suspicion in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable seizures. Tracing the background of Rodriguez from the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Terry v. Ohio, this Comment argues that Rodriguez is best understood as a reaction to the continued erosion of Fourth Amendment protections in the investigative stop context. Based on that understanding, this Comment argues for a strict reading of Rodriguez, …

Per Curiam Signals In The Supreme Court's Shadow Docket, Zina Makar

Washington Law Review

Lower courts and litigants depend a great deal on the Supreme Court to articulate and communicate signals regarding how to interpret existing doctrine. Signals are at their strongest and most reliable when they originate from the Court’s merits docket. More recently, the Court has been increasingly relying on its orders docket—colloquially referred to as its “shadow docket”—to communicate with lower courts by summarily reversing and correcting errors in interpretation without briefing or oral argument.

Over the past decade the Roberts Court has granted certiorari to summarily reverse a growing number of qualified immunity cases, issuing over a dozen unsigned per …

Telegraph, Telephone And The Internet: The Making Of The Symbiotic Model Of Surveillance States, Dongsheng Zang

Articles

In the early 2000s, shortly before the September 11 attacks, Daniel J. Solove noted that computer databases in the United States were controlled by public as well as private bureaucracies. In that sense, Solove argued, the "Big Brother" metaphor "fails to capture the most important dimension of the database problem." In his 2008 Lockhart lecture, constitutional law scholar Jack M. Balkin argued that the United States has gradually transformed from a welfare and national security state to a National Surveillance State: "a new form of governance that features the collection, collation, and analysis of information about populations both in the …

Gone Fishing: Casting A Wide Net Using Geofence Warrants, Ryan Tursi

Washington Law Review

Technology companies across the country receive requests from law enforcement agencies for cell phone location information near the scenes of crimes. These requests rely on the traditional warrant process and are known as geofence warrants, or reverse location search warrants. By obtaining location information, law enforcement can identify potential suspects or persons of interest who were near the scene of a crime when they have no leads. But the use of this investigative technique is controversial, as it threatens to intrude upon the privacy of innocent bystanders who had the misfortune of being nearby when the crime took place. Innocent …

The Long Road To Justice: Why State Courts Should Lower The Evidentiary Burden For Proving Racialized Traffic Stops And Adopt The Exclusionary Rule As A Remedy For Equal Protection Violations, Abby M. Fink

Washington Journal of Social & Environmental Justice

Racist and brutal policing continues to pervade the criminal legal system. Black and brown people who interact with the police consistently face unequal targeting and treatment. Routine traffic stops are especially dangerous and harmful and can lead to death. Under Whren, a police officer’s racist motivations or implicit bias towards a driver do not influence the constitutionality of a traffic stop. An officer only needs to show there was probable cause to believe a traffic stop occurred. Although the unconstitutionality of pre-textual traffic stops has been widely explored since Whren, both federal and state courts have struggled to find legal …

Privacy And National Politics: Fingerprint And Dna Litigation In Japan And The United States Compared, Dongsheng Zang

Articles

Drawing cases from two related areas of law-fingerprint and DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) data-this Article proposes a modified framework, built on the Balkin-Levinson emphasis on national politics: First, national politics understood as partisan rivalry cannot account for what I call doctrinal lock-in in this Article, where I will demonstrate that in different stages of American politics-the Lochner era, the New Deal era, and Civil Rights era-courts across the nation ruled predominantly in favor of public data collectors-state and federal law enforcement in fingerprint cases. From the 1990s, when DNA data became hot targets of law enforcement, the United States Supreme Court …