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Articles 1 - 28 of 28
Full-Text Articles in Law
Administrative Regulation Of Programmatic Policing: Why "Leaders Of A Beautiful Struggle" Is Both Right And Wrong, Christopher Slobogin
Administrative Regulation Of Programmatic Policing: Why "Leaders Of A Beautiful Struggle" Is Both Right And Wrong, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Aerial Investigation Research (AIR), Baltimore's aerial surveillance program, violated the Fourth Amendment because it was not authorized by a warrant. AIR was constitutionaly problematic, but not for the reason given by the Fourth Circuit. AIR, like many other technologically-enhanced policing programs that rely on closed-circuit television (CCTV), automated license plate readers and the like, involves the collection and retention of information about huge numbers ofpeople. Because individualized suspicion does not exist with respect to any of these people's information, an individual-specific warrant …
Equality In The Streets: Using Proportionality Analysis To Regulate Street Policing, Christopher Slobogin
Equality In The Streets: Using Proportionality Analysis To Regulate Street Policing, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The racially disparate impact and individual and collective costs of stop and frisk, misdemeanor arrests, and pretextual traffic stops have been well documented. Less widely noticed is the contrast between Supreme Court case law permitting these practices and the Court's recent tendency to strictly regulate technologically enhanced searches that occur outside the street policing setting and that--coincidentally or not--happen to be more likely to affect the middle class. If, as the Court has indicated, electronic tracking and searches of digital records require probable cause that evidence of crime will be found, stops and frisks should also require probable cause that …
Police As Community Caretakers: Caniglia V. Strom, Christopher Slobogin
Police As Community Caretakers: Caniglia V. Strom, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
What is the proper role of the police? That question has been at the forefront of debates about policing for quite some time, but especially in the past year. One answer, spurred by countless news stories about black people killed by law enforcement officers, is that the power of the police should be reduced to the bare minimum, with some in the Defund the Police movement calling for outright abolition of local police departments. Toward the other end of the spectrum is the notion that the role of the police in modern society is and must be capacious. Police should …
A World Of Difference? Law Enforcement, Genetic Data, And The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin, J. W. Hazel
A World Of Difference? Law Enforcement, Genetic Data, And The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin, J. W. Hazel
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Law enforcement agencies are increasingly turning to genetic databases as a way of solving crime, either through requesting the DNA profile of an identified suspect from a database or, more commonly, by matching crime scene DNA with DNA profiles in a database in an attempt to identify a suspect or a family member of a suspect. Neither of these efforts implicates the Fourth Amendment, because the Supreme Court has held that a Fourth Amendment "search" does not occur unless police infringe "expectations of privacy society is prepared to recognize as reasonable" and has construed that phrase narrowly, without reference to …
Primer On Risk Assessment For Legal Decision-Makers, Christopher Slobogin
Primer On Risk Assessment For Legal Decision-Makers, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This primer is addressed to judges, parole board members, and other legal decisionmakers who use or are considering using the results of risk assessment instruments (RAIs) in making determinations about post-conviction dispositions, as well as to legislators and executive officials responsible for authorizing such use. It is meant to help these decisionmakers determine whether a particular RAI is an appropriate basis for legal determinations and whether evaluators who rely on an RAI have done so properly. This primer does not take a position on whether RAIs should be integrated into the criminal process. Rather, it provides legal decision-makers with information …
The Sacred Fourth Amendment Text, Christopher Slobogin
The Sacred Fourth Amendment Text, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The Supreme Court's jurisprudence governing the Fourth Amendment's "threshold"--a word meant to refer to the types of police actions that trigger the amendment's warrant and reasonableness requirements--has confounded scholars and students alike since Katz v. United States. Before that 1967 decision, the Court's decisions on the topic were fairly straightforward, based primarily on whether the police trespassed on the target's property or property over which the target had control. After that decision-which has come to stand for the proposition that a Fourth Amendment search occurs if police infringe an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable--scholars …
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 …
Cause To Believe What? The Importance Of Defining A Search's Object--Or, How The Aba Would Analyze The Nsa Metadata Surveillance Program, Christopher Slobogin
Cause To Believe What? The Importance Of Defining A Search's Object--Or, How The Aba Would Analyze The Nsa Metadata Surveillance Program, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Courts and scholars have devoted considerable attention to the definition of probable cause and reasonable suspicion. Since the demise of the mere evidence rule in the 1960s, however, they have rarely examined how these central Fourth Amendment concepts interact with the object of the search. That is unfortunate, because this interaction can have significant consequences. For instance, probable cause to believe that a search might lead to evidence of wrongdoing triggers a very different inquiry than probable cause to believe that a search will produce evidence of criminal activity. The failure to address the constraints that should be imposed on …
The Exclusionary Rule: Is It On Its Way Out? Should It Be?, Christopher Slobogin
The Exclusionary Rule: Is It On Its Way Out? Should It Be?, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This symposium, comprising six articles in addition to this one, was triggered by a spate of Supreme Court opinions occurring over the last seven years, all of which raise the two questions in the title to this article (which is also the title of the symposium). Since 1974, when United States v. Calandra definitively established deterrence as the primary objective of the suppression remedy, the Court has nibbled away at the exclusionary rule from a number of different directions. But the Court's decisions in Hudson v. Michigan (2006), Herring v. United States (2009), and Davis v. United States (2011) reveal …
Rehnquist And Panvasive Searches, Christopher Slobogin
Rehnquist And Panvasive Searches, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In the history of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist may have been the least friendly justice toward the view that the Fourth Amendment should be read expansively. Even he, however, might have interpreted the amendment to place more restrictions on modern law enforcement techniques than current caselaw does. Relying on a 1974 article authored by Rehnquist, this essay, written for a symposium on Rehnquist and the Fourth Amendment, describes his views on the types of requirements the Fourth Amendment imposes on the police, how decriminalization can protect privacy, and most importantly, why Rehnquist might have been willing to regulate surveillance …
What Is The Essential Fourth Amendment?, Christopher Slobogin
What Is The Essential Fourth Amendment?, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In More Essential Than Ever: The Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century, Stephen Schulhofer provides a strong, popularized brief for interpreting the Fourth Amendment as a command that judicial review precede all non-exigent police investigative actions that are more than minimally intrusive. This review points out a few places where Schulhofer may push the envelope too far or not far enough, but concludes that More Essential Than Ever is a welcome reminder for scholars and the public at large that the Fourth Amendment is a fundamental bulwark of constitutional jurisprudence and deserves more respect than the Supreme Court has given …
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 …
Some Hypotheses About Empirical Desert, Christopher Slobogin
Some Hypotheses About Empirical Desert, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Paul Robinson has written a series of articles advocating the view that empirical desert should govern development of criminal law doctrine. The central contention of empirical desert is that adherence to societal views of justice“ defined in terms of moral blameworthiness will not only satisfy retributive urges, but will also often be as efficacious at controlling crime as a system that revolves around other utilitarian purposes of punishment. Constructing criminal laws that implement empirical desert has the latter effect, Robinson argues, because it enhances the moral credibility of the law, thus minimizing citizens desire to engage in vigilantism and other …
Government Dragnets, Christopher Slobogin
Government Dragnets, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This article examines group-focused police investigation techniques - for instance, roadblocks, drug testing programs, area or industry-wide health and safety inspections, data mining, and camera surveillance - a phenomenon referred to as "government dragnets" because these general searches and seizures attempt to cull out bad actors through ensnaring a much larger number of individuals who are innocent of any wrongdoing. The courts have imposed few limitations on dragnets. Recent commentary has either advocated an even more laissez-faire attitude toward these group search and seizures or, at the other end of the spectrum, proposed schemes that would make most of them …
Separated By A Common Language?, Yesha Yadav
Separated By A Common Language?, Yesha Yadav
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This paper examines recent controversies in the legal and policy debate between the U.S. and the EU on the sharing of data in the implementation of transatlantic counter-terrorism measures. The nexus between law and policy in this area is particularly close, reflecting the preferences each jurisdiction has in protecting civil liberty and security interests. While the U.S. and the EU offer differing legal frameworks on data privacy, the strategic importance of data in counter-terrorism law and policy necessitates a joint approach. A failure to arrive at such an approach can result in a series of bilateral agreements between the U.S. …
Government Data Mining And The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin
Government Data Mining And The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The government's ability to obtain and analyze recorded information about its citizens through the process known as data mining has expanded enormously over the past decade. Although the best-known government data mining operation (Total Information Awareness, more recently dubbed Terrorism Information Awareness) supposedly no longer exists, large-scale data mining by federal agencies devoted to enforcing criminal and counter-terrorism laws has continued unabated. This paper addresses three puzzles about data mining. First, when data mining is undertaken by the government, does it implicate the Fourth Amendment? Second, does the analysis change when data mining is undertaken by private entities which then …
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 …
Transaction Surveillance By The Government, Christopher Slobogin
Transaction Surveillance By The Government, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This symposium article is the second of two on regulation of government efforts to obtain recorded information for criminal prosecutions. More specifically, it explores the scope and regulation of "transaction surveillance," which it defines as government attempts to access already existing records, either physically or through data banks, and government efforts to obtain, in real-time or otherwise, "catalogic data" (the identifying signals of a transaction, such as the address of an email recipient). Transaction surveillance is a potent way of discovering and making inferences about a person's activities, character and identity. Yet, despite a bewildering array of statutorily created authorization …
The Poverty Exception To The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin
The Poverty Exception To The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This essay, written for the Sixth Annual LatCrit conference, explores the subterranean motifs of current rules regulating searches and seizures by the police. More specifically, it investigates whether and to what extent alienage, race and poverty influence the warrant and individualized suspicion rules purportedly governing police investigation. The essay begins by showing that, contrary to the assertion of other conference participants, Supreme Court doctrine has not created a "Mexican exception" to the Fourth Amendment (as distinguished from an "illegal alien" exception, which does seem to exist). The main focus of the article, however, is an examination of whether the Court's …
Peeping Techno-Toms And The Fourth Amendment: Seeing Through Kyllo's Rules Governing Technological Surveillance, Christopher Slobogin
Peeping Techno-Toms And The Fourth Amendment: Seeing Through Kyllo's Rules Governing Technological Surveillance, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This article suggests that the Supreme Court's decision in Kyllo v. United States may not be as protective of the home as it first appears. Kyllo held that use of a thermal imager to detect heat sources inside the home is a fourth amendment search, requiring a warrant and probable cause. But it also held that use of technology that is in "general public use" or that only discovers what a naked eye observer could see from a public vantage point is not a search, even when the location viewed is the interior of the home. This article shows that …
An Empirically Based Comparison Of American And European Regulatory Approaches To Police Investigation, Christopher Slobogin
An Empirically Based Comparison Of American And European Regulatory Approaches To Police Investigation, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This article takes a comparative and empirical look at two of the most significant methods of police investigation: searches for and seizures of tangible evidence and interrogation of suspects. It first compares American doctrine regulating these investigative tools with the analogous rules predominant in Europe (specifically, England, France and Germany). It then discusses research on the American system that sheds light on the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two regulatory systems. More often than not, the existing data call into question preconceived notions of what "works." In particular, American reverence for search warrants, the exclusionary rule, and "Miranda" warnings …
Why Liberals Should Chuck The Exclusionary Rule, Christopher Slobogin
Why Liberals Should Chuck The Exclusionary Rule, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This article makes the case against the exclusionary rule from a "liberal" perspective. Moving beyond the inconclusive empirical data on the efficacy of the rule, it uses behavioral and motivational theory to demonstrate why the rule is structurally unable to deter individual police officers from performing most unconstitutional searches and seizures. It also argues, contrary to liberal dogma, that the rule is poor at promoting Fourth Amendment values at the systemic, departmental level. Finally, the article contends that the rule stultifies liberal interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, in large part because of judicial heuristics that grow out of constant exposure …
Let's Not Bury Terry: A Call For Rejuvenation Of The Proportionality Principle, Christopher Slobogin
Let's Not Bury Terry: A Call For Rejuvenation Of The Proportionality Principle, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Thirty years ago, "Terry v. Ohio" established a conceptual framework for the Fourth Amendment that makes more sense than any alternative the courts or commentators have come up with since. That frame-work, which I call the proportionality principle, is very simple: a search or seizure is reasonable if the strength of its justification is roughly proportionate to the level of intrusion associated with the police action. As the Court put it, "there is 'no ready test for determining reasonableness other than by balancing the need to search or seize against the invasion which the search or seizure entails.' In "Terry" …
Technologically-Assisted Physical Surveillance: The American Bar Association's Tentative Draft Standards, Christopher Slobogin
Technologically-Assisted Physical Surveillance: The American Bar Association's Tentative Draft Standards, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
As the name implies, the American Bar Association's Tentative Draft Standards Concerning Technologically-Assisted Physical Surveillance is a work in progress...Final approval by the ABA hierarchy is still some time away, so feedback could have an impact. Indeed, it is anticipated that the content of at least some of the standards will change prior to their submission to the House of Delegates...The work of the Task Force on Technology and Law Enforcement has persuasively demonstrated that some regulatory structure governing the use of physical surveillance technology is necessary. This work provides a model for future attempts to establish guidelines for other …
Having It Both Ways: Proof That The U.S. Supreme Court Is "Unfairly" Prosecution-Oriented, Christopher Slobogin
Having It Both Ways: Proof That The U.S. Supreme Court Is "Unfairly" Prosecution-Oriented, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
If the assertions that this essay makes about the Court's "unfair" prosecution-orientation withstand scrutiny," two further conclusions might follow. First, the highest court in the country is so fixated on ensuring that a particular side wins that it is willing with some frequency to sacrifice the most basic attribute of any court worthy of the name-the appearance of fairness. This conclusion is a much more fundamental challenge to the Court's integrity than is the simple acknowledgement that a majority of the Justices are biased in favor of the government. Second, to the extent the Court's unfairness becomes common knowledge, its …
World Without A Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin
World Without A Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The subject of this Article is suggested by a single question: How would we regulate searches and seizures if the Fourth Amendment did not exist? This question is a useful one to ask even leaving aside the possibility of amending the amendment. Starting on a blank slate, as it were, should free us from current preconceptions about the law of search and seizure, ingrained after years of analyzing current dogma. Viewed from this fresh perspective, we might gain a better understanding of the values at stake when the state seeks to obtain evidence or detain suspects. This new understanding in …
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 …
Capacity To Contest A Search And Seizure: The Passing Of Old Rules And Some Suggestions For New Ones, Christopher Slobogin
Capacity To Contest A Search And Seizure: The Passing Of Old Rules And Some Suggestions For New Ones, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Professor Slobogin examines recent Supreme Court decisions involving standing to challenge search and seizure violations, and argues that the Court's commitment to a "totality of the circumstances" approach has permitted erosion of fourth amendment protections. After concluding that these decisions provide little guidance to lower courts, Professor Slobogin offers a set of principles which will aid in analyzing the Court's direction.