Fourth Amendment Commons^™

A Loophole In The Fourth Amendment: The Government's Unregulated Purchase Of Intimate Health Data, Rhea Bhatia

Washington Law Review Online

Companies use everyday applications and personal devices to collect deeply personal information about a user’s body and health. While this “intimate health data” includes seemingly innocuous information about fitness activities and basic vitals, it also includes extremely private information about the user’s health, such as chronic conditions and reproductive health. However, consumers have no established rights over the intimate health data shared on their devices. Believing that these technologies are created for their benefit, consumers hand over the most intimate aspects of their lives through health-related applications relying on the promise that their data will remain private. Today, the intimate …

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 …

Revising Reasonableness In The Cloud, Ian Walsh

Washington Law Review

Save everything—just in case––and search for it later. This is a modern mantra fueled by the ubiquity of smartphones, laptops, tablets, and free or low-cost data storage that leads users to store massive amounts of data in the cloud. But when users trust third-party cloud storage providers with private communications, they also surrender Fourth Amendment constitutional certainty. Existing statutory safeguards for these communications are lower than Fourth Amendment warrant and probable cause standards; this permits the government to seize large quantities of users’ private communications stored in the cloud with only minimal justification. Due to the revealing nature of such …

Privacy In The Cloud: The Fourth Amendment Fog, Sarah Aitchison

Washington Law Review

The Cloud has changed how individuals record, store, and aggregate their personal information. As technology’s capacity for holding an individual’s most intimate details and recording day-to-day experiences increases, Fourth Amendment privacy protections become less equipped to respond to technological advances. These advances allow private companies to store an immense amount of their consumers’ personal information, and government entities to obtain that information. In response, tech companies have begun refusing to comply with government demands for information collected and stored in their devices and in the Cloud, and are increasingly ending up in court, fighting orders to disclose consumer information. A …

Dangerous Warrants, Nirej Sekhon

Washington Law Review

The Supreme Court has cast judicial warrants as the Fourth Amendment gold standard for regulating police discretion. It has embraced a “warrant preference” on the premise that requiring police to obtain advance judicial approval for searches and seizures encourages accurate identification of evidence and suspects while minimizing interference with constitutional rights. The Court and commentators have overlooked the fact that most outstanding warrants do none of these things. Most outstanding warrants are what this article terms “non-compliance warrants”: summarily issued arrest warrants for failures to comply with a court or police order. State and local courts are profligate in issuing …

Orwell's 1984 And A Fourth Amendment Cybersurveillance Nonintrusion Test, Margaret Hu

Washington Law Review

This Article describes a cybersurveillance nonintrusion test under the Fourth Amendment that is grounded in evolving customary law to replace the reasonable expectation of privacy test formulated in Katz v. United States. To illustrate how customary law norms are shaping modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, this Article examines the recurrence of judicial references to George Orwell’s novel, 1984, within the Fourth Amendment context when federal courts have assessed the constitutionality of modern surveillance methods. The Supreme Court has indicated that the Fourth Amendment privacy doctrine must now evolve to impose meaningful limitations on the intrusiveness of new surveillance technologies. …

Searching For The Appropriate Standard: Stops, Seizure, And The Reasonable Person's Willingness To Walk Away From The Police, Desiree Phair

Washington Law Review

A person is “seized” by an officer, and thus entitled to Fourth Amendment protections, if a reasonable person would not feel free to leave. Although courts must set a standard for when a person has been seized by an officer, few real-world studies exist regarding when individuals feel truly free to disregard the police. In addition, gathering new data poses challenges. This Comment presents newly produced data sets and then explores adjustments to the current reasonable person standard, arguing the advantages of focusing on officer actions as opposed to the current focus on whether a defendant feels “free to leave.” …

"Reasonable Zones Of Privacy"—The Supreme Court's Struggle To Find Clarity In The American Landscape Regarding Fourth Amendment Rights, Alex Alben

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

The U.S. Supreme Court has struggled over the years to develop the concept of what constitutes a "reasonable zone of privacy" when it comes to intrusion on an individual's physical space or activities. With the advent and widespread adoption of new technologies such as drones and listening devices, concern for protecting privacy has magnified, yet court doctrine remains inconsistent. The author, Washington State's Chief Privacy Officer, reviews the history of Supreme Court "search and seizure" rulings in prominent cases to identify both patterns and flaws on the topic of protecting citizen privacy.

Digital Border Searches After Riley V. California, Thomas Mann Miller

Washington Law Review

The federal government claims that the Fourth Amendment permits it to search digital information on cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices at the international border without suspicion of criminal activity, much less a warrant. Until recently, federal courts have generally permitted these digital border searches, treating them no differently from searches of luggage. Courts that have limited digital border searches have required only that the government establish reasonable suspicion for the most exhaustive kind of digital search. The Supreme Court has not yet weighed in, but last year it held in Riley v. California that the search incident to …

Spying On Americans: At What Point Does The Nsa's Collection And Searching Of Metadata Violate The Fourth Amendment?, Elizabeth Atkins

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Edward Snowden became a household name on June 5, 2013, when he leaked highly classified documents revealing that the American Government was spying on its citizens. The information exposed that the National Security Agency (NSA) collected millions of American’s metadata through forced cooperation with telephone-service providers. Metadata contains sensitive and private information about a person’s life. When collected and searched, metadata can reveal a portrait of a person’s intimate activities amounting to a violation of one’s reasonable expectation of privacy. This Article suggests changing the current standard allowing the NSA to collect and search metadata under Section 215 of the …

Policing By Numbers: Big Data And The Fourth Amendment, Elizabeth E. Joh

Washington Law Review

This article identifies three uses of big data that hint at the future of policing and the questions these tools raise about conventional Fourth Amendment analysis. Two of these examples, predictive policing and mass surveillance systems, have already been adopted by a small number of police departments around the country. A third example—the potential use of DNA databank samples—presents an untapped source of big data analysis. Whether any of these three examples of big data policing attract more widespread adoption by the police is yet unknown, but it likely that the prospect of being able to analyze large amounts of …

Property, Privacy And Power: Rethinking The Fourth Amendment In The Wake Of U.S. V. Jones, Dana Raigrodski

Articles

This Article seeks to uncover invisible gender, race, and class biases driving modern Fourth Amendment discourse. Unlike traditional theories, which tend to view the Fourth Amendment through the lens of either privacy or property, this Article advances a theory focusing on the real issues of power and control that fuel Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Specifically, the Article exposes the private/public and home/market dichotomies that are central to the Supreme Court rhetoric as arbitrary and artificial. It finds that current Fourth Amendment discourse protects the interest of white, privileged men and perpetuates male ideology as well as male domination. That focus leaves …

Fourth Amendment Remedial Equilibration: A Comment On Herring V. United States And Pearson V. Callahan, David B. Owens

Articles

In two recent decisions, the Supreme Court addressed remedies under the Fourth Amendment by assuming that this remedial construction did not alter the value of the underlying right meant to be protected by the Constitution. First, in Herring v. United States, the court broadened exceptions to the exclusionary rule and implied that suppression may not be required for "negligent" errors generally. Then, in Pearson v. Callahan, the Court abandoned it's "battle-of-order" rule - which required courts to consider the right before inquiring whether that right was "clearly established" at the time of the violation - when considering qualified …

York V. Wahkiakum School District And The Future Of School Searches Under The Washington State Constitution, Kerem Murat Levitas

Washington Law Review

In March 2008, the Supreme Court of Washington decided York v. Wahkiakum School District, a case involving mandatory, suspicionless drug testing of student athletes. The court struck down the testing regime, but, unable to agree on the grounds for invalidating the testing, issued three separate opinions. The lead opinion argued that suspicionless testing could never be countenanced under the Washington Constitution. Two concurrences argued that suspicionless testing could be permissible under certain circumstances pursuant to a variant of the federal special-needs doctrine. This Note reviews search-and-seizure protections under the United States and Washington constitutions, their application to school search …

Border Searches Of Laptop Computers After United States V. Arnold: Implications For Traveling Professionals, Cooper Offenbecher

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently held that border searches of laptop computers do not require reasonable suspicion. The decision, in United States v. Arnold, reflects the continued intent of the Ninth Circuit—along with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals—to continue analyzing laptop computer searches under the traditional border search doctrine. This article will examine recent laptop computer search cases in light of the border search doctrine and will consider the implications for lawyers and business professionals who travel abroad with confidential information on laptops and other electronic-storage devices. The article will also consider the implications of such …

Reasonableness And Objectivity: A Feminist Discourse Of The Fourth Amendment, Dana Raigrodski

Articles

This article suggests that a critical reexamination of the Fourth Amendment and its jurisprudence through feminist lenses can shed new light and add to our understanding of it. These insights, in turn, can and should generate a positive feminist Fourth Amendment jurisprudence—a distinctive feminist voice to be integrated systematically into the law of search and seizure, leading to a transformation of the Fourth Amendment itself. Applying feminist theories to particular issues and normative layers of current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence may help guide us through the more difficult task of imagining a feminist jurisprudence of search and seizure law.

Protestors Have Fourth Amendment Rights, Too: In Graves V. City Of Coeur D'Alene, The Ninth Circuit Clouds Clearly Established Law Governing Searches, Holly Vance

Washington Law Review

In Graves v. City of Coeur d'Alene, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded that a police officer should not have arrested a protestor at an Aryan Nations parade when the protestor refused to allow the officer to search his backpack. The court held that the arrest was illegal because the officer had no probable cause to believe the protestor was carrying a weapon. However, the court also held that the arresting officer was entitled to qualified immunity and thus not liable for his violation of the protestor's rights. Qualified immunity is a privilege that …

Consent Engendered: A Feminist Critique Of Consensual Fourth Amendment Searches, Dana Raigrodski

Articles

As I will argue, the Court's consent-to-search cases are driven by this patriarchal ideology to maintain social structures of power disparities and to perpetuate the subordination of women, minorities, and other disempowered members of society.

We need to acknowledge the power and submission paradigm that underlies police-citizen encounters and to scrutinize the entire notion of consent. In order to confront both power and consent, I will turn to feminist critique of consent, particularly in the area of rape, and to feminist writings about choice and agency. Based on these writings I will argue that by distinguishing coerced consent to a …

State V. Parker: Searching The Belongings Of Nonarrested Vehicle Passengers During A Search Incident To Arrest, H. Matthew Munson

Washington Law Review

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article I, Section 7 of the Washington Constitution generally require a warrant supported by probable cause to conduct a search or seizure. One exception to these requirements is a search incident to arrest, which permits the police to search arrested persons and the area within the arrestee's reach for weapons and evidence. Prior to State v. Parker, when police arrested an occupant of an automobile in Washington, they could search the entire passenger compartment of the vehicle with the exception of locked containers. In State v. Parker, a plurality of …

Shut The Blinds And Lock The Doors—Is That Enough?: The Scope Of Fourth Amendment Protection Outside One's Own Home, Ramsey Ramerman

Washington Law Review

The Fourth Amendment was designed to be a barrier that protects citizens from unreasonable government intrusion and surveillance. However, for the Amendment to grant meaningful protection, the rules that govern the scope of that protection must supply guidance to police and citizens. While the Fourth Amendment unquestionably protects people in their own homes, the scope of the Amendment's protection outside the home is not clear. In Rakas v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court held that courts should define the scope of Fourth Amendment protection by considering sources outside of the Fourth Amendment. While Rakas provides guidance to courts, it …

Breaking Out Of "Custody": A Feminist Voice In Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Dana Raigrodski

Articles

In this Essay, I suggest that reexamination of this field of law through a feminist lens can shed new light and add to the understanding of constitutional criminal procedure. These insights, in turn, can and should generate a positive feminist jurisprudence of criminal procedure—a distinctive feminist voice to be integrated systematically into our constitutional criminal procedure and our criminal justice system. Applying feminist legal theories to particular areas of constitutional criminal procedure may help guide us through the more difficult task of constructing a positive feminist jurisprudence of constitutional criminal procedure. Many areas of constitutional criminal procedure lend themselves as …

Search And Seizure, Third-Part Consent: Rethinking Police Conduct And The Fourth Amendment, Gregory S. Fisher

Washington Law Review

Two recent decisions offer different approaches for assessing police conduct in third-party consent cases. In Illinois v. Rodriguez the United States Supreme Court held that police may rely on third parties' apparent authority to consent to a search so long as police reasonably believe in third parties' authority. In State v. Leach, the Supreme Court of Washington held that police cannot rely on third parties' consent when defendants are present and able to object, even if defendants did not object to the search. This Comment argues that courts should focus on police conduct, rather than on defendants' presence or on …

Aliens' Fourth Amendment Rights Against Government Searches Abroad—United States V. Verdugo-Urquidez, 856 F.2d 1214 (9th Cir. 1988), Cert. Granted, 109 S. Ct. 1741 (1989), Richard J. Dolan

Washington Law Review

The "war on drugs" and the effort to contain international terrorism have raised questions of when the Constitution restricts the actions of the United States government abroad. This Note analyzes United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, a case in which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that aliens have fourth amendment rights against United States government searches of their residences abroad. The Note agrees that the court's holding was correct, but suggests the court's "natural rights" theory was too broad to comport with prior Supreme Court limitations of aliens' constitutional rights. Instead, the Note suggests that the relationship between an alien …