Fourth Amendment Commons^™

Out Of The “Serbonian Bog”1 Surrounding Government Acquisition Of Third-Party Cell Site Location Information: “Get A Warrant” †, Glenn Williams

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Futile Fourth Amendment: Understanding Police Excessive Force Doctrine Through An Empirical Assessment Of Graham V. Connor, Osagie K. Obasogie, Zachary Newman

Northwestern University Law Review

Graham v. Connor established the modern constitutional landscape for police excessive force claims. The Supreme Court not only refined an objective reasonableness test to describe the constitutional standard, but also held that the Fourth Amendment is the sole avenue for courts to adjudicate claims that police violated a person’s constitutional rights in using force. In this Essay, we ask: What impact did this decision have on the nature of police excessive force claims in federal courts? To address this, we engaged in a qualitative examination of 500 federal cases (250 in the twenty-six years before Graham and 250 in ...

Fourth Amendment Fairness, Richard M. Re

Michigan Law Review

Fourth Amendment doctrine is attentive to a wide range of interests, including security, informational privacy, and dignity. How should courts reconcile these competing concerns when deciding which searches and seizures are “unreasonable”? Current doctrine typically answers this question by pointing to interest aggregation: the various interests at stake are added up, placed on figurative scales, and compared, with the goal of promoting overall social welfare. But interest aggregation is disconnected from many settled doctrinal rules and leads to results that are unfair for individuals. The main alternative is originalism; but historical sources themselves suggest that the Fourth Amendment calls for ...

The Exigencies Of Drunk Driving: Cripps V. State And The Issues With Taking Drivers' Blood Without A Warrant, Timothy Andrea

Boston College Law Review

Few of the government’s investigatory techniques implicate individual privacy concerns more than the taking and testing of a suspect’s blood. These blood draws are a common tool used to fight drunk driving. In 2013, in Missouri v. McNeely, the U.S. Supreme Court reiterated the need for case-by-case review when considering whether exigent circumstances justify warrantless blood testing of drunk driving suspects. An Oklahoma statute takes a different approach by categorically abdicating the warrant requirement and authorizing law enforcement to draw blood from any driver involved in an accident that results in serious bodily injury. In 2016, in ...

“You’Re Not Gonna Reach My Telephone”— The Resurgence Of The Fourth Amendment’S Particularity Requirement, Tammie Beassie Banko

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bounded By The Constitution: Resolving The Private Search Doctrine Circuit Split, Mark Kifarkis

Concordia Law Review

This Article analyzes the private search doctrine exception to the Fourth Amendment and the exception's application to smart phones and computers. The private search doctrine allows governmental authorities to replicate a private individual's search without obtaining a warrant. This Article proposes a standard for court's to use to resolve the circuit split on how to apply the exception to today's technology. Presently, there are two standards used by courts. The Article names one standard as the "boundless search approach" that is used by the Fifth and Seventh Circuits. The Article names the other standard as "bounded ...

Investigative Practices For Large Money Laundering Crimes, Mary Hutley-Washington

Economic Crime Forensics Capstones

Reportedly, governments, states departments, analysts and law enforcement state, "money laundering has a corrosive effect on a country’s economy. The degree of destruction caused by money laundering interrupts the business flow, runs the risk of financial burdens on banks, and ruins countless countries’ reputation for allowing widespread laundering. Money laundering’s significant consequences are the exposure to the communities; because of the criminal elements individuals are subjected to laundering, i.e., fraud, drug trafficking, and other financial crimes” (Freeman, 2011). It is no surprise that internationally all communities want the battle against money laundering and its use to finance ...

A Tale Of Two Clauses: Search And Seizure, Establishment Of Religion, And Constitutional Reason, Perry Dane

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Article dissects two developments in widely separate areas of American constitutional law—the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test for the Fourth Amendment’s Search and Seizure Clause and the “endorsement” test for the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. These two stories might seem worlds apart, and they have not previously been systematically examined together. Nevertheless, the Article argues that they have in common at least three important symptoms of our legal culture’s deep malaise. These three phenomena occur in other contexts, too, but they appear with special clarity and a stark cumulative force in the two stories on ...

Is Your Smartphone Conversation Private? The Stingray Device’S Impact On Privacy In States, Katherine M. Sullivan

Catholic University Law Review

“Where are you” is a common question to receive on your cellphone, but it is up to you whether or not to respond with an answer. No longer does this question need to be asked due to advancements in surveillance technology. When pinpointing a criminal suspect, the question can be answered by local and state agencies, without the person of interest knowing, by using a StingRay device. The main question to be asked is does the conduct of locating a criminal suspect’s exact location without a warrant, violate an individual’s Fourth Amendment Constitutional right to be free from ...

Hernandez V. Mesa: Preserving The Zone Of Constitutional Uncertainty At The Border, Alexandra A. Botsaris

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sniffing Out The Fourth Amendment: United States V. Place-Dog Sniffs-Ten Years Later, Hope Walker Hall

Maine Law Review

In the endless and seemingly futile government war against drugs, protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution may have fallen by the wayside as courts struggle to deal with drug offenders. The compelling government interest in controlling the influx of drugs all too often results in a judicial attitude that the ends justify the means. Judges can be reluctant to exclude evidence of drugs found in an unlawful search pursuant to the exclusionary rule, which provides that illegally obtained evidence may not be used at trial. The exclusion of drugs as evidence in drug cases often ...

Dead Canaries In The Coal Mines: The Symbolic Assailant Revisited, Jeannine Bell

Georgia State University Law Review

The well-publicized deaths of several African-Americans—Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling among others—at the hands of police stem from tragic interactions predicated upon well-understood practices analyzed by police scholars since the 1950s. The symbolic assailant, a construct created by police scholar Jerome Skolnick in the mid-1960s to identify persons whose behavior and characteristics the police view as threatening, is especially relevant to contemporary policing. This Article explores the societal roots of the creation of a Black symbolic assailant in contemporary American policing.

The construction of African-American men as symbolic assailants is one of the most important factors ...

Arrested Development: Rethinking Fourth Amendment Standards For Seizures And Uses Of Force In Schools, Alexis Karteron

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Implications Of The Private Search Doctrine In A Digital Age: Advocating For Limitations On Warrantless Searches Through Adoption Of The Virtual File Approach, Brianna M. Espeland

Idaho Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lack Of “Purposefulness” & “Flagrancy” Or Simply Turning A Blind Eye To The Current State Of Affairs?: The Need For Statistical Data, Renei Caballes

Golden Gate University Law Review

This Comment argues that the Court misapplied the attenuation doctrine in Strieff, specifically in its application and interpretation of the language “purposeful and flagrant” and explores the possible implications of this decision. First, Section I explains the Fourth Amendment and the basic principles of law regarding searches and seizures, including the exclusionary rule and attenuation doctrine. Then, Section II examines the circuit court split prior to Utah v. Strieff and how each circuit interpreted the language “purposeful and flagrant.” Finally, Section III analyzes the issues with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of “purposeful and flagrant” in Utah v. Strieff and ...

Steering (Or Not) Through The Social And Legal Implications Of Autonomous Vehicles, Melissa L. Griffin

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

No abstract provided.

These Walls Can Talk! Securing Digital Privacy In The Smart Home Under The Fourth Amendment, Stefan Ducich

Duke Law & Technology Review

Privacy law in the United States has not kept pace with the realities of technological development, nor the growing reliance on the Internet of Things (IoT). As of now, the law has not adequately secured the “smart” home from intrusion by the state, and the Supreme Court further eroded digital privacy by conflating the common law concepts of trespass and exclusion in United States v. Jones. This article argues that the Court must correct this misstep by explicitly recognizing the method by which the Founding Fathers sought to “secure” houses and effects under the Fourth Amendment. Namely, the Court must ...

“A Search Is A Search”: Scanning A Credit, Debit, Or Gift Card Is A Search Under The Fourth Amendment, John A. Leblanc

Boston College Law Review

On May 18, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in United States v. Hillaire, joined the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth circuits in holding that the government’s act of scanning the magnetic stripes of lawfully seized credit, debit, or gift cards to access the information encoded therein is not a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. In each case, the courts concluded that an individual is precluded from claiming a reasonable expectation of privacy in the electronic information encoded on a card’s magnetic stripe. This Note provides an overview of how Fourth ...

Policing, Technology, And Doctrinal Assists, Bennett Capers

Florida Law Review

Sounding the alarm about technology, policing, and privacy has become an almost daily occurrence. We are told that the government’s use of technology as a surveillance tool is an “insidious assault on our freedom.” That it is “nearly impossible to live today without generating thousands of records about what we watch, read, buy and do—and the government has access to them.” The message is clear. Big Brother is watching. And we should be afraid.

But the police use of technology, or what this Article terms “techno-policing,” does not have to be dystopian. This Article challenges conventional thinking and ...

Excessive Force, Police Dogs, And The Fourth Amendment In The Ninth Circuit: The Use Of Summary Judgement In Lowry V. City Of San Diego, Natasha Dobrott

Boston College Law Review

On June 6, 2017, in Lowry v. City of San Diego, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sitting en banc upheld a district court’s grant of summary judgment, dismissing a claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for use of excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in the context of “bite and hold” training for police dogs. This Comment argues that although the use of force in Lowry may have been reasonable, the court was incorrect in deciding this question as a matter of law. The fact-intensive objective ...