The Automated Fourth Amendment, 2024 University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
The Automated Fourth Amendment, Maneka Sinha
Faculty Scholarship
Courts routinely defer to police officer judgments in reasonable suspicion and probable cause determinations. Increasingly, though, police officers outsource these threshold judgments to new forms of technology that purport to predict and detect crime and identify those responsible. These policing technologies automate core police determinations about whether crime is occurring and who is responsible. Criminal procedure doctrine has failed to insist on some level of scrutiny of—or skepticism about—the reliability of this technology. Through an original study analyzing numerous state and federal court opinions, this Article exposes the implications of law enforcement’s reliance on these practices given the weighty interests …
Bill Of Rights Nondelegation, 2023 Brigham Young University Law School
Bill Of Rights Nondelegation, Eli Nachmany
BYU Law Review
Speculation about the “revival” of the nondelegation doctrine has reached a fever pitch. Although the Supreme Court apparently has not applied the nondelegation doctrine to declare a federal statute unconstitutional since 1935, the doctrine may be making a comeback. The common understanding is that the nondelegation doctrine prohibits Congress from “delegating” legislative power to the executive branch. While the nondelegation doctrine may appear to be about limiting Congress, its ultimate target is delegation. But if the nondelegation doctrine is about policing delegation, then the Court has been regularly — and rigorously — applying the doctrine in a different context: In …
Wrong Or (Fundamental) Right?: Substantive Due Process And The Right To Exclude, 2023 University of Washington School of Law
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 …
Breaking The Fourth's Wall: The Implications Of Remote Education For Students' Fourth Amendment Rights, 2023 Vanderbilt University Law School
Breaking The Fourth's Wall: The Implications Of Remote Education For Students' Fourth Amendment Rights, Sallie Hatfield
Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law
As the COVID-19 pandemic forced both public K-12 and higher education institutions to transition to exclusively provide remote education, students’ homes and personal lives were exposed to the government like never before. Zoom classes and remote proctoring were suddenly the norm. Students and their families scrambled to create appropriate offices and classroom spaces in their homes, and many awkward and invasive scenarios soon followed. While many may have been harmlessly captured on camera, like classes that witness a student’s family eating lunch in the background or a dog on the couch, even these harmless instances have insidious implications for the …
You Can’T Teach Old Katz New Tricks: It’S Time To Revitalize The Fourth Amendment, 2023 University of Miami School of Law.
You Can’T Teach Old Katz New Tricks: It’S Time To Revitalize The Fourth Amendment, Jeremy Connell
University of Miami Law Review
For over half a century, the Court’s decision in Katz v. United States has been the lodestar for applying the Fourth Amendment. The Katz test has produced a litany of confusing and irreconcilable decisions in which the Court has carved exceptions into the doctrine and then carved exceptions into the exceptions. These decisions often leave lower courts with minimal guidance on how to apply the framework to new sets of facts and leave legal scholars and commenters befuddled and frustrated with the Court’s explanations for the rulings. The Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States represents the apex of Katz’s …
Dna Analysis: The Answer For Unsolved Cases?, 2023 Concordia University St. Paul
Dna Analysis: The Answer For Unsolved Cases?, Sarah Hetchler
Master of Arts in Criminal Justice Leadership
DNA analysis has become a crucial part of solving cases. It has developed significantly since its creation in the mid-1980s. The longing for answers within unsolved cases is historically lengthy, leaving traces of distrust and injustice. Criminologists offer a potential solution to the mess created by connecting DNA analysis to protect victims and communities. DNA evidence and analysis can assist in solving cases and provide answers for exonerees. Like public genealogy websites, law enforcement agencies must acknowledge new methods to solve issues. Not only could law enforcement agencies solve and arrest suspects through DNA analysis, but DNA could also provide …
Table Of Contents, 2023 Seattle University School of Law
Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review
Seattle University Law Review
Table of Contents
Reasonable In Time, Unreasonable In Scope: Maximizing Fourth Amendment Protections Under Rodriguez V. United States, 2023 University of Washington School of Law
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, …
Private Police Regulation And The Exclusionary Remedy: How Washington Can Eliminate The Public/Private Distinction, 2023 University of Washington School of Law
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 …
A Miscarriage Of Justice: How Femtech Apps And Fog Data Evade Fourth Amendment Privacy Protections, 2023 Washington and Lee University School of Law
A Miscarriage Of Justice: How Femtech Apps And Fog Data Evade Fourth Amendment Privacy Protections, Rachel Silver
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
After the fall of Roe v. Wade, states across the country have enacted extreme abortion bans. Anti-abortion states, emboldened by their new, unrestricted power to regulate women’s bodies, are only broadening the scope of abortion prosecutions. And modern technology provides law enforcement with unprecedented access to women’s most intimate information, including, for example, their menstrual cycle, weight, body temperature, sexual activity, mood, medications, and pregnancy details. Fourth Amendment law fails to protect this sensitive information stored on femtech apps from government searches. In a largely unregulated private market, femtech apps sell health and location data to third parties like Fog …
How To Punish Your Least Favorite Online Influencer: Wellness Checks As Swatting And Their Disproportionate Impact On Marginalized Creators, 2023 Washington and Lee University School of Law
How To Punish Your Least Favorite Online Influencer: Wellness Checks As Swatting And Their Disproportionate Impact On Marginalized Creators, Tara Blackwell
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
Marginalized online creators are vulnerable to attacks using digital means of harassment including traditional swatting as well as the abuse of wellness checks that can act as swatting. Enabled by permissive Supreme Court 4th Amendment jurisprudence, malignant online actors have taken advantage of the ramshackle system of wellness checks that sends armed police officers with little training and even less compassion to the doors of individuals with reported mental health crises. This Note focuses on two polarizing influencers who have been subject to wellness check swatting after being very open about their mental health statuses online. This Note argues that …
Stay Out Of My Head: Neurodata, Privacy, And The First Amendment, 2023 Quinnipiac University School of Law
Stay Out Of My Head: Neurodata, Privacy, And The First Amendment, Wayne Unger
Washington and Lee Law Review
The once science-fictional idea of mind-reading is within reach as advancements in brain-computer interfaces, coupled with advanced artificial intelligence, produce neurodata—the collection of substantive thoughts as storable and processable data. But government access to individuals’ neurodata threatens personal autonomy and the right to privacy. While the Fourth Amendment is traditionally considered the source of privacy protections against government intrusion, the First Amendment provides more robust protections with respect to whether governments can access one’s substantive ideas, thoughts, and beliefs. However, many theorists assert that the concept of privacy conflicts with the First Amendment because privacy restricts the flow of information …
The United States Should Take A Page Out Of Canadian Law When It Comes To Privacy, Genetic And Otherwise, 2023 University of Miami School of Law
The United States Should Take A Page Out Of Canadian Law When It Comes To Privacy, Genetic And Otherwise, Ashley Rahaim
University of Miami Inter-American Law Review
Genetic information is intimate and telling data warranting privacy in public and private realms. The privacy protections offered in the United States and Canada vastly differ when it comes to genetic privacy. Search and seizure law mirrors the privacy gap in the countries, as well as their treatment of DNA database information.
This note explores the foreshadowing of the creation of genetic privacy laws and their varying levels of protection based on the way private information was treated by state actors through search and seizure caselaw, the creation of legal precedent, and the treatment of intimate personal data in the …
Per Curiam Signals In The Supreme Court's Shadow Docket, 2023 University of Baltimore School of Law
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 …
The Tesla Meets The Fourth Amendment, 2023 Brigham Young University Law School
The Tesla Meets The Fourth Amendment, Adam M. Gershowitz
BYU Law Review
Can police search a smart car’s computer without a warrant? Although the Supreme Court banned warrantless searches of cell phones incident to arrest in Riley v. California, the Court left the door open for warrantless searches under other exceptions to the warrant requirement. This is the first article to argue that the Fourth Amendment’s automobile exception currently permits the police to warrantlessly dig into a vehicle’s computer system and extract vast amounts of cell phone data. Just as the police can rip open seats or slash tires to search for drugs under the automobile exception, the police can warrantlessly extract …
Asking For It: Gendered Dimensions Of Surveillance Capitalism, 2023 Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads
Asking For It: Gendered Dimensions Of Surveillance Capitalism, Jessica Rizzo
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis
Advertising and privacy were once seen as mutually antagonistic. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans went to court to fight for their right to be free from the invasion of privacy presented by unwanted advertising, but a strange realignment took place in the 1970s. Radical feminists were among those who were extremely concerned about the collection and computerization of personal data—they worried about private enterprise getting a hold of that data and using it to target women—but liberal feminists went in a different direction, making friends with advertising because they saw it as strategically valuable.
Liberal feminists argued that in …
Privacy Lost: How The Montana Supreme Court Undercuts The Right Of Privacy, 2023 Seattle University School of Law
Privacy Lost: How The Montana Supreme Court Undercuts The Right Of Privacy, Kevin Frazier
Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental & Innovation Law
In 1972, Montanans ratified a new constitution that included a “right of privacy.” The plain text of the provision fails to express the intent of the Framers who not only intended to afford Montanans a right, but also to impose a responsibility on the State to continuously and thoroughly examine State practices in light of evolving means of invading residents’ privacy. This intent has gone unrealized despite the fact that the intent of the Framers is clear, readily available, and the primary source state courts ought to use when interpreting the Constitution. This article delves into the transcripts of the …
The Ambiguity Of Probable Cause And Its Contentious Application By Police, 2023 College of the Holy Cross
The Ambiguity Of Probable Cause And Its Contentious Application By Police, Dave Sainte-Luce
College Honors Program
It is well documented how our country’s Criminal Justice System has a history of targeting people of color. A lot of this contention is derived from police officers’ behavior when interacting with individuals, yet officers only act upon the laws and legal policies that grant them authority, including probable cause. My thesis addresses the question, how does the fluid and ambiguous nature of probable cause leave the door open for officers to disproportionately target people of color in the United States? While focusing on vehicle, person, and property searches, I first define probable cause, building an understanding of exactly what …
The Fourth Amendment's Constitutional Home, 2023 William & Mary Law School
The Fourth Amendment's Constitutional Home, Gerald S. Dickinson
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
The home enjoys omnipresent status in American constitutional law. The Bill of Rights, peculiarly, has served as the central refuge for special protections to the home. This constitutional sanctuary has elicited an intriguing textual and doctrinal puzzle. A distinct thread has emerged that runs through the first five amendments delineating the home as a zone where rights emanating from speech, smut, gods, guns, soldiers, searches, sex, and self-incrimination enjoy special protections. However, the thread inexplicably unravels upon arriving at takings. There, the constitutional text omits and the Supreme Court’s doctrine excludes a special zone of safeguards to the home. This …
A New Test For The New Crime Exception, 2023 University of South Carolina - Columbia
A New Test For The New Crime Exception, Colin Miller
Utah Law Review
The new crime exception to the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule allows prosecutors to introduce evidence connected to new crimes committed by defendants who were illegally detained and/or questioned. Unfortunately, as illustrated in this Article, courts largely have applied this new crime exception without any analytical framework or regard for the severity of the initial police misconduct or the defendant’s response. Moreover, courts have begun applying the new crime exception to crimes such as giving a fake name in response to an un-Mirandized interrogation following a lawful arrest.
By doing so, courts have allowed the new crime exception to swallow two …