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Surveillance Technologies And Constitutional Law, Christopher Slobogin, Sarah Brayne
Surveillance Technologies And Constitutional Law, Christopher Slobogin, Sarah Brayne
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This review focuses on government use of technology to observe, collect, or record potential criminal activity in real-time, as contrasted with “transaction surveillance” that involves government efforts to access already-existing records and exploit Big Data, topics that have been the focus of previous reviews (Brayne 2018, Ridgeway 2018). Even so limited, surveillance technologies come in many guises, including closed-circuit television, automated license plate and facial readers, aerial cameras, and GPS tracking. Also classifiable as surveillance technology are devices such as thermal and electromagnetic imagers that can “see” through walls and clothing. Finally, surveillance includes wiretapping and other forms of communication …
Policing As Administration, Christopher Slobogin
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 …
Making The Most Of United States V. Jones In A Surveillance Society: A Statutory Implementation Of Mosaic Theory, Christopher Slobogin
Making The Most Of United States V. Jones In A Surveillance Society: A Statutory Implementation Of Mosaic Theory, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In the Supreme Court's recent decision in United States v. Jones, a majority of the Justices appeared to recognize that under some circumstances aggregation of information about an individual through governmental surveillance can amount to a Fourth Amendment search. If adopted by the Court, this notion sometimes called "mosaic theory"-could bring about a radical change to Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, not just in connection with surveillance of public movements-the issue raised in Jonesbut also with respect to the government's increasingly pervasive record-mining efforts. One reason the Court might avoid the mosaic theory is the perceived difficulty of implementing it. This article …
Why Crime Severity Analysis Is Not Reasonable, Christopher Slobogin, Jeffrey Bellin, Et Al.
Why Crime Severity Analysis Is Not Reasonable, Christopher Slobogin, Jeffrey Bellin, Et Al.
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Jeffrey Bellin’s article, Crime Severity Distinctions and the Fourth Amendment: Reassessing Reasonableness in a Changing World, argues that the severity of the crime under investigation ought to be taken into account in assessing both the reasonableness of searches and whether a government action is a search in the first place. In pursuit of this objective, his article provides the best attempt to date at dealing with the difficult issue of separating serious from not-so serious crimes (he ends up with three categories—grave, serious and minor. He then makes the enticing argument that calibrating the degree of Fourth Amendment protection according …
An Original Take On Originalism, Christopher Slobogin
An Original Take On Originalism, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The argument that Professor Orin Kerr proffers in An Equilibrium-Adjustment Theory of the Fourth Amendment' is simple: Fourth Amendment law ought to be structured to ensure that the balance of power between government and citizenry remains constant. This equilibrium-adjustment theory is elegant and, because it rests on a relatively "neutral" historical foundation, might be attractive to judges and scholars from different perspectives. Contrary to Kerr's assertion, however, it does not easily explain many of the Court's cases, nor does it help address the most difficult Fourth Amendment issues facing the Court today. The historical foundations on which it rests are …
The Liberal Assault On The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin
The Liberal Assault On The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
As construed by the Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment's reasonableness requirement regulates overt, non-regulatory government searches of homes, cars, and personal effects-and virtually nothing else. This essay is primarily about how we got to this point. It is fashionable to place much of the blame for today's law on the Warren Court's adoption of the malleable expectation of privacy concept as the core value protected by the Fourth Amendment. But this diagnosis fails to explain why even the more liberal justices have often gone along with many of the privacy-diminishing holdings of the Court. This essay argues that three other …
The Continuing Evolution Of Criminal Constitutional Law In State Courts, S. Carran Daughtrey
The Continuing Evolution Of Criminal Constitutional Law In State Courts, S. Carran Daughtrey
Vanderbilt Law Review
Although early state constitutions were important and ambitious documents for their time, the development of state constitutional law stagnated after the drafting and adoption of the federal constitution., As the doctrine of federalism has resurfaced, however, states have begun to turn to their constitutions to grant more protection for their citizens. The states' criminal constitutional laws have changed significantly and continue to evolve today.
In the 1960s, the Warren Court expanded basic protections for criminal defendants by finding that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. The Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual …
The Algebra Of Pluralism: Subjective Experience As A Constitutional Variable, Barbara J. Flagg
The Algebra Of Pluralism: Subjective Experience As A Constitutional Variable, Barbara J. Flagg
Vanderbilt Law Review
Adzan Bedonie is a Navajo woman who speaks no English, holds tightly to traditional Navajo beliefs, and lives in a one-room hogan on the wrong side of the line drawn by a federal court to partition Navajo and Hopi lands.' The law that mandates her relocation and thus threatens to sever what for her is a spiritual connection to the land on which she lives offers a potential escape route: Congress provided for a limited number of life estates for older individuals subject to relocation. But Adzan Bedonie, like most elderly Navajo, has not applied for a life estate, because …
Reasonable Expectations Of Privacy And Autonomy In Fourth Amendment Cases: An Empirical Look At "Understandings Recognized And Permitted By Society", Christopher Slobogin, Joseph E. Schumacher
Reasonable Expectations Of Privacy And Autonomy In Fourth Amendment Cases: An Empirical Look At "Understandings Recognized And Permitted By Society", Christopher Slobogin, Joseph E. Schumacher
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This Article reports an attempt to investigate empirically important aspects of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, as construed by the United States Supreme Court. In the course of doing so, it touches upon two other topics. Most directly, it addresses the appropriate scope of the Fourth Amendment. Less directly, it raises questions about the role that empirical research should play in fashioning constitutional rules.
State Adoption Of Federal Law: Exploring The Limits Of Florida's "Forced Linkage" Amendment, Christopher Slobogin
State Adoption Of Federal Law: Exploring The Limits Of Florida's "Forced Linkage" Amendment, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This article examines the "forced linkage" between state and federal provisions that the 1983 amendment establishes in Florida. It concludes that forced linkage is ill-conceived, because it is inimical to state court independence. Accordingly, this article argues, the 1983 amendment to article I, section 12 of the Florida Constitution should be repealed. If not repealed, it should be interpreted to permit Florida courts broad discretion in developing their own stance on search and seizure law. So construed, the amendment would only require Florida courts to abide by those United States Supreme Court opinions that provide (1) an authoritative holding that …