Law Commons^™

Policing As Administration, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Police agencies should be governed by the same administrative principles that govern other agencies. This simple precept would have significant implications for regulation of police work, in particular the type of suspicionless, group searches and seizures that have been the subject of the Supreme Court's special needs jurisprudence (practices that this Article calls "panvasive"). Under administrative law principles, when police agencies create statute-like policies that are aimed at largely innocent categories of actors-as they do when administering roadblocks, inspection regimes, drug testing programs, DNA sampling programs, and data collection-they should have to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking or a similar democratically …

Policing Criminal Justice Data, Wayne A. Logan, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Update On School Searches, Charles J. Russo

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

School safety continues to present significant challenges for education leaders. Yet as educators work to maintain school safety, boards face a steady stream of litigation because officials have searched students suspected of putting themselves or others in danger. For example, students have been searched because they were suspected of bringing into schools such prohibited items as alcohol, weapons, and drugs.

Education leaders must develop up-to-date policies that ensure safety but that also comply with the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

New Approaches To Data-Driven Civilian Oversight Of Law Enforcement: An Introduction To The Second Nacole/Cjpr Special Issue, Daniel L. Stageman, Nicole M. Napolitano, Brian Buchner

Publications and Research

In April of 2016, National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) and John Jay College partnered to sponsor the Academic Symposium “Building Public Trust: Generating Evidence to Enhance Police Accountability and Legitimacy.” This essay introduces the Criminal Justice Policy Review Special Issue featuring peer-reviewed, empirical research papers first presented at the Symposium. We provide context for the Symposium in relation to contemporary national discourse on police accountability and legitimacy. In addition, we review each of the papers presented at the Symposium, and provide in-depth reviews of each of the manuscripts included in the Special Issue.

Justice Scalia’S Originalism And Formalism: The Rule Of Criminal Law As A Law Of Rules, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Far too many reporters and pundits collapse law into politics, assuming that the left–right divide between Democratic and Republican appointees neatly explains politically liberal versus politically conservative outcomes at the Supreme Court. The late Justice Antonin Scalia defied such caricatures. His consistent judicial philosophy made him the leading exponent of originalism, textualism, and formalism in American law, and over the course of his three decades on the Court, he changed the terms of judicial debate. Now, as a result, supporters and critics alike start with the plain meaning of the statutory or constitutional text rather than loose appeals to legislative …

Newsroom: Goldstein On Drug Databases 6-27-2016, Sheri Qualters, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Castaneda V. State Of Nevada, 132 Nev. Adv. Op. 44 (June 16, 2016), Chelsea Finnegan

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appellant was convicted of 15 counts of child pornography under NRS 200.730. Appellant contested 14 of the 15 charges, arguing that his possession of 15 images of child pornography constituted only one violation. The Court agreed and determined that prosecuting each image or depiction of child pornography as a separate charge under NRS 200.730 is not what the legislature intended. The statute should not be read to charge each “possession” as one violation. The Court reversed 14 of the charges.

Madison At Fort Meade: Checks, Balances, And The Nsa, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Positive Law Model Of The Fourth Amendment, William Baude, James Y. Stern

Faculty Publications

For fifty years, courts have used a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard to define “searches” under the Fourth Amendment. As others have recognized, that doctrine is subjective, unpredictable, and conceptually confused, but viable alternatives have been slow to emerge. This Article supplies one.

We argue that Fourth Amendment protection should be anchored in background positive law. The touchstone of the search-and-seizure analysis should be whether government officials have done something forbidden to private parties. It is those actions that should be subjected to Fourth Amendment reasonableness review and the presumptive requirement to obtain a warrant. In short, Fourth Amendment protection …

13th Annual Diversity Symposium Dinner 04-07-2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Unilateral Invasions Of Privacy, Roger Allan Ford

Law Faculty Scholarship

Most people seem to agree that individuals have too little privacy, and most proposals to address that problem focus on ways to give those users more information about, and more control over, how information about them is used. Yet in nearly all cases, information subjects are not the parties who make decisions about how information is collected, used, and disseminated; instead, outsiders make unilateral decisions to collect, use, and disseminate information about others. These potential privacy invaders, acting without input from information subjects, are the parties to whom proposals to protect privacy must be directed. This Article develops a theory …

The Post-Riley Search Warrant: Search Protocols And Particularity In Cell Phone Searches, Adam M. Gershowitz

Faculty Publications

Last year, in Riley v. California, the Supreme Court required police to procure a warrant before searching a cell phone. Unfortunately, the Court’s assumption that requiring search warrants would be “simple” and very protective of privacy was overly optimistic. This article reviews lower court decisions in the year since Riley and finds that the search warrant requirement is far less protective than expected. Rather than restricting search warrants to the narrow evidence being sought, some magistrates have issued expansive warrants authorizing a search of the entire contents of the phone with no restrictions whatsoever. Other courts have authorized searches …

Newsroom: A True Original(Ist) 02-15-2016, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The History, Means, And Effects Of Structural Surveillance, Jeffrey L. Vagle

All Faculty Scholarship

The focus on the technology of surveillance, while important, has had the unfortunate side effect of obscuring the study of surveillance generally, and tends to minimize the exploration of other, less technical means of surveillance that are both ubiquitous and self-reinforcing—what I refer to as structural surveillance— and their effects on marginalized and disenfranchised populations. This Article proposes a theoretical framework for the study of structural surveillance which will act as a foundation for follow-on research in its effects on political participation.

The Hidden Under Caste Of America: An Examination Of The Effects Of Terry V. Ohio, Florida V. Bostick, & Whren V. United States And Colorblindness On African Americans, Austin Schoeck

Political Science: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Anthony Amsterdam's Perspectives On The Fourth Amendment, And What It Teaches About The Good And Bad In Rodriguez V. United States, Tracey Maclin

Faculty Scholarship

Anthony Amsterdam’s article, Perspectives On The Fourth Amendment is one of the best, if not the best, law review article written on the Fourth Amendment. Thus, Minnesota Law Review on its hundredth anniversary fittingly recognizes and honors Professor Amsterdam’s article in its Symposium edition, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Celebrating 100 Volumes of the Minnesota Law Review.” I am flattered that the Law Review invited me to participate in this Symposium.

Specifically, my article connects two perspectives from Amsterdam’s article — the Fourth Amendment’s concern with discretionary police power and the Framers’ vision of the Fourth Amendment to bar …

Civil Arrest? (Another) St. Louis Case Study In Unconstitutionality, Mae Quinn, Eirik Cheverud

Journal Articles

This Article advances a simple claim in need of enforcement in this country right now: no person may be arrested for an alleged violation of civil, as opposed to criminal, law. Indeed, courts have long interpreted the Fourth Amendment as prohibiting arrest except when probable cause exists to believe that a crime has been committed and that the defendant is the person who committed the crime. However, in many places police take citizens into custody without a warrant for the non-criminal conduct of allegedly breaking civil laws. This unfortunate phenomenon received national attention in St. Louis, Missouri following the death …

Evidence Laundering In A Post-Herring World, Kay L. Levine, Jenia I. Turner, Ronald F. Wright

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court’s decision in Herring v. United States authorizes police to defeat the Fourth Amendment’s protections through a process we call evidence laundering. Evidence laundering occurs when one police officer makes a constitutional mistake when gathering evidence and then passes that evidence along to a second officer, who develops it further and then delivers it to prosecutors for use in a criminal case. The original constitutional taint disappears in the wash.

Courts have allowed evidence laundering in a variety of contexts, from cases involving flawed databases to cases stemming from faulty judgments and communication lapses in law enforcement teams. …

Policing Criminal Justice Data, Wayne Logan, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article addresses a matter of fundamental importance to the criminal justice system: the presence of erroneous information in government databases and the limited government accountability and legal remedies for the harm that it causes individuals. While a substantial literature exists on the liberty and privacy perils of large multi-source data assemblage, often termed "big data," this article addresses the risks associated with the collection, generation and use of "small data" (i.e., individual-level, discrete data points). Because small data provides the building blocks for all data-driven systems, enhancing its quality will have a significant positive effect on the criminal justice …

Flagrant Police Abuse: Why Black Lives (Also) Matter To The Fourth Amendment, Joelle A. Moreno

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court's Quiet Expansion Of Qualified Immunity, Kit Kinports

Journal Articles

This Essay discusses the Supreme Court’s tendency in recent opinions to covertly expand the reach of the qualified immunity defense available to public officials in § 1983 civil rights suits. In particular, the Essay points out that the Court, often in per curiam rulings, has described qualified immunity in increasingly broad terms and has qualified and retreated from its precedents, without offering any explanation or even acknowledging that it is deviating from past practice.

In making this claim, I focus on three specific issues: the manner in which the Court characterizes the standard governing the qualified immunity defense; the question …

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 …

Whither Reasonable Suspicion: The Supreme Court's Functional Abandonment Of The Reasonableness Requirement For Fourth Amendment Seizures, Steven P. Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

Although the United States Supreme Court’s approach to issues governing application of the probable cause requirement of the Fourth Amendment has mutated over the years, at least one aspect of its approach has remained constant. Before information leading to probable cause or its lesser iteration of reasonable suspicion is found to exist, the government must demonstrate in some meaningful way the reliability of the person providing the information or of the information itself. Lacking such reliability, no search or seizure based on probable cause or reasonable suspicion is permitted. In its recent decision in Navarette v. California, the Court largely …

Lawn Signs: A Fourth Amendment For Constitutional Curmudgeons, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

What is the constitutional significance of the proverbial "keep off the grass" sign? This question — asked by curmudgeonly neighbors everywhere — has been given new currency in a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court. Indeed, Florida v. Jardines might have bestowed constitutional curmudgeons with significant new Fourth Amendment protections. By expressing expectations regarding — and control over — access to property, "the people" may be able to claim greater Fourth Amendment protections not only for their homes, but also for their persons, papers, and effects. This article launches a constitutionally grounded, but lighthearted campaign of citizen education …

Arbitrary Law Enforcement Is Unreasonable: Whren's Failure To Hold Police Accountable For Traffic Enforcement Policies, Jonathan Witmer-Rich

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Whren v. United States is surely a leading contender for the most controversial and heavily criticized Supreme Court case that was decided in a short, unanimous opinion. The slip opinion is only thirteen pages long, and provoked no dissents or even concurring opinions. Critical reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. Criticism not withstanding, the Court has not retreated from Whren, but continues to repeat its core holding.

Part I frames the problem in Whren with a story. Part II sets forth the fundamental Fourth Amendment principle underlying this article—the prohibition against arbitrary search and seizure. Part III explains how arbitrariness …

Whren's Flawed Assumptions Regarding Race, History, And Unconscious Bias, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

This article is adapted from remarks presented at CWRU Law School's symposium marking the 20th anniversary of Whren v. United States. The article critiques Whren’s constitutional methodology and evident willful blindness to issues of social psychology, unconscious bias, and the lengthy American history of racialized conceptions of crime and criminalized conceptions of race. The article concludes by suggesting a possible path forward: reconceptualizing racially motivated pretextual police encounters as a badge or incident of slavery under the Thirteenth Amendment issue rather than as abstract Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment issues.

Riley V. California And The Beginning Of The End For The Third-Party Search Doctrine, David A. Harris

Articles

In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court decided that when police officers seize a smart phone, they may not search through its contents -- the data found by looking into the call records, calendars, pictures and so forth in the phone -- without a warrant. In the course of the decision, the Court said that the rule applied not just to data that was physically stored on the device, but also to data stored "in the cloud" -- in remote sites -- but accessed through the device. This piece of the decision may, at last, allow a re-examination of …

The Internet Of Things And The Fourth Amendment Of Effects, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

By 2020 there will be billions of “things” connected through the “Internet of Things.” These smart devices built within our homes, cars, smartphones, clothing, and accessories present new possibilities for technological surveillance for law enforcement. This network of smart devices also poses a new challenge for a Fourth Amendment built around “effects.” The constitutional language protecting “persons, houses, papers, and effects” from unreasonable searches and seizures must confront this change. This article addresses how a Fourth Amendment built on old-fashioned “effects” can address a new world when things are no longer just inactive, static objects, but objects that create and …

Dna And Distrust, Kerry Abrams, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past three decades, government regulation and funding of DNA testing has reshaped the use of genetic evidence across various fields, including criminal law, family law, and employment law. Courts have struggled with questions of when and whether to treat genetic evidence as implicating individual rights, policy trade-offs, or federalism problems. We identify two modes of genetic testing: identification testing, used to establish a person’s identity, and predictive testing, which seeks to predict outcomes for a person. Judges and lawmakers have often drawn a bright line at predictive testing, while allowing uninhibited identity testing. The U.S. Supreme Court in …

Anthony Amsterdam's Perspectives On The Fourth Amendment, And What It Teaches About The Good And Bad In Rodriguez V. United States, Tracey Maclin

UF Law Faculty Publications

Anthony Amsterdam’s article, Perspectives On The Fourth Amendment is one of the best, if not the best, law review article written on the Fourth Amendment. Thus, Minnesota Law Review on its hundredth anniversary fittingly recognizes and honors Professor Amsterdam’s article in its Symposium edition, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Celebrating 100 Volumes of the Minnesota Law Review.” I am flattered that the Law Review invited me to participate in this Symposium. Specifically, my article connects two perspectives from Amsterdam’s article — the Fourth Amendment’s concern with discretionary police power and the Framers’ vision of the Fourth Amendment to bar …