Law Commons^™

A Fourth Amendment Pathfinder: Stop-And-Frisk And Race, Emily Pratt

Upper Level Writing Requirement Research Papers

No abstract provided.

An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

Protesting is supposed to be revered in our democracy, considered “as American as apple pie” in our nation’s mythology. But the actual experiences of the 2020 racial justice protesters showed that this supposed reverence for political dissent and protest is more akin to American folklore than reality on the streets. The images from those streets depicted police officers clad in riot gear and armed with shields, batons, and “less than” lethal weapons aggressively arresting protesters, often en masse. In the first week of the George Floyd protests, police arrested roughly 10,000 people, and approximately 78 percent of those arrests were …

"Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! These Mass Arrests Have Got To Go!": The Expressive Fourth Amendment Argument, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

The racial justice protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 constitute the largest protest movement in the United States. Estimates suggest that between fifteen and twenty-six million people protested across the country during the summer of 2020 alone. Not only were the number of protestors staggering, but so were the number of arrests. Within one week of when the video of George Floyd’s murder went viral, police arrested ten thousand people demanding justice on American streets, with police often arresting activists en masse. This Essay explores mass arrests and how they square with Fourth Amendment …

Revitalizing Fourth Amendment Protections: A True Totality Of The Circumstances Test In § 1983 Probable Cause Determinations, Ryan Sullivan

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

The Article analyzes claims of police misconduct and false arrest, specifically addressing the issue of whether a police officer may ignore evidence of an affirmative defense, such as self-defense, when determining probable cause for an arrest. The inquiry most often arises in § 1983 civil claims for false arrest where the officer was aware of some evidence a crime had been committed, but was also aware of facts indicating the suspect had an affirmative defense to the crime observed. In extreme cases, the affirmative defense at issue is actually self-defense in response to the officer’s own unlawful conduct. As police …

Cops And Cars: How The Automobile Drove Fourth Amendment Law, Tracey Maclin

Faculty Scholarship

This is an essay on Professor Sarah A. Seo’s new book, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard Univ. Press 2019). I focus on Professor Seo’s analysis of Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132 (1925) and Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160 (1949). Carroll is important not only because it was the Court’s first car case. Understanding Carroll (and Brinegar, which solidified and expanded Carroll’s holding) is essential because, nearly one hundred years later, its logic continues to direct how the modern Court resolves Fourth Amendment claims of motorists. Put simply, a majority of today’s …

The End Of Intuition-Based High-Crime Areas, Ben Grunwald, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In 2000, the Supreme Court held in Illinois v. Wardlow that a suspect’s presence in a “high-crime area” is relevant in determining whether an officer has reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigative stop. Despite the importance of the decision, the Court provided no guidance about what that standard means, and over fifteen years later, we still have no idea how police officers understand and apply it in practice. This Article conducts the first empirical analysis of Wardlow by examining data on over two million investigative stops conducted by the New York Police Department from 2007 to 2012.

Our results suggest …

Brief Of Appellant, Abdullah Malik Joppy A/K/A Richard Joppy V. State Of Maryland, No. 533, Paul Dewolfe, Renée M. Hutchins, Peter Honnef

Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Heien'S Mistake Of Law, Kit Kinports

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court has been whittling away at the Fourth Amendment for decades. The Court's 2014 ruling in Heien v. North Carolina allowing the police to make a traffic stop based on a reasonable mistake of law generated little controversy among the Justices and escaped largely unnoticed by the press-perhaps because yet another Supreme Court decision reading the Fourth Amendment narrowly is not especially noteworthy or because the opinion's cursory and overly simplistic analysis equating law enforcement's reasonable mistakes of fact and law minimized the significance of the Court's decision. But the temptation to dismiss Heien as just another small …

A Shattered Looking Glass: The Pitfalls And Potential Of The Mosaic Theory Of Fourth Amendment Privacy, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court issued a landmark non-decision in United States v. Jones. In that case, officers used a GPS-enabled device to track a suspect’s public movements for four weeks, amassing a considerable amount of data in the process. Although ultimately resolved on narrow grounds, five Justices joined concurring opinions in Jones expressing sympathy for some version of the “mosaic theory” of Fourth Amendment privacy. This theory holds that we maintain reasonable expectations of privacy in certain quantities of information even if we do not have such expectations in the constituent parts. This Article examines and …

In The Trenches: Searches And The Misunderstood Common-Law History Of Suspicion And Probable Cause, Fabio Arcila

Scholarly Works

A detailed analysis of the common law during the Framers’ era, and of how it reflected the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions, shows that many judges believed they could issue search warrants without independently assessing the adequacy of probable cause, and that this view persisted even after the Fourth Amendment became effective. This conclusion challenges the leading originalist account of the Fourth Amendment, which Professor Thomas Davies published in the Michigan Law Review in 1999.

Learned treatises in particular, and to a lesser extent a few case decisions, had articulated a judicial duty to monitor probable cause. But it is a mistake …

Search Me?, John Burkoff

Articles

Professor Burkoff contends that most people who purportedly "consent" to searches by law enforcement officers are not really - freely and voluntarily, as the Supreme Court decisional law supposedly requires - consenting to such searches. Yet, absent unusual circumstances, the great likelihood is that a court nonetheless will conclude that such consent was valid and any evidence seized admissible under the Fourth Amendment. Professor Burkoff argues, however, that the Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Georgia v. Randolph now dictates that the application of consent law doctrine should reflect the actual voluntariness (or involuntariness) of the questioned consents that come before …

The Fourth Amendment And Terrorism, John Burkoff

Articles

The important questions we need to ask and to answer B in the perilous times in which we live B is whether the Fourth Amendment applies in the same fashion not just to run of the mill criminals, but also to terrorists and suspected terrorists, individuals who are committing or who have committed B or who may be poised to commit B acts aimed at the destruction of extremely large numbers of people? Professor Burkoff argues that we can protect ourselves from cataclysmic threats of this sort and still maintain a fair and objective application of Fourth Amendment doctrine that …

'A Flame Of Fire': The Fourth Amendment In Perilous Times, John Burkoff

Articles

The important questions we need to ask and to answer in the perilous times in which we live is whether the Fourth Amendment applies in the same fashion not just to run of the mill criminals, but also to terrorists and suspected terrorists, individuals who are committing or who have committed B or who may be poised to commit B acts aimed at the destruction of extremely large numbers of people? Professor Burkoff argues that we can protect ourselves from cataclysmic threats of this sort and still maintain a fair and objective application of Fourth Amendment doctrine that respects our …

When Terry Met Miranda: Two Constitutional Doctrines Collide, Mark A. Godsey

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

No abstract provided.

The Right Of The People To Be Secure, Ronald J. Bacigal

Law Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article defines searches and seizures of property and person, discussing the Supreme Court's initially broad interpretation of the Fourth Amendment and its subsequent narrowing in later decisions. Part II discusses several police "chase cases" leading up to the elimination of accidental and attempted seizures from Fourth Amendment protection in Brower v. County of Inyo and California v. Hodari D. Part Ill analyzes the Brower decision and its effect on accidental seizures, concluding that the analysis set forth therein should be abolished and advocating an alternate test. Part IV confronts the Court's elimination of attempted seizures from …

The Fourth Amendment And Its Exclusionary Rule, Yale Kamisar

Articles

"The history of liberty," Justice Felix Frankfurter once noted, "has largely been the history of observance of procedural safeguards" and "the history of the destruction of liberty," Professor Anthony Amsterdam has added, "has largely been the history of the relaxation of those safeguards in the face of plausible sounding governmental claims of a need to deal with widely frightening and emotion freighted threats to the good order of society." These plausible-sounding government claims are being heard today -and they are putting enormous pressure on the Fourth Amendment, the constitutional provision that protects "the right of the people to be secure …

Electronic Surveillance, Computers, And The Fourth Amendment - The New Telecommunications Environment Calls For Reexamination Of Doctrine, Arthur R. Landever

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

We are in the midst of a revolution in information collection and telecommunications. Computer networking, the unification of the various telecommunications systems, the establishment of central data banks, and government tracking and profiling of vast numbers of Americans present momentous challenges for our constitutional system. Increasingly, in our evolving culture, an individual enters the public setting in order to conduct his personal life. Fourth Amendment doctrine respecting electronic surveillance, as well as Supreme Court notions of "free choice" and "assumption of risk" must come to grips with this new reality. In the main, the author urges judicial intervention, as the …