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Better-Off Walking: Wyoming V. Houghton Exemplifies What Acevedo Failed To Rectify, Erin Morris Meadows

University of Richmond Law Review

Over the years the United States Supreme Court attempted to produce bright-line rules governing the automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. However, the Court's numerous, often confusing decisions in the past eight decades served only to blur those lines. With each attempt to fashion rules that would be workable for both law enforcement in application and lower courts in administration, citizens' Fourth Amendment rights were narrowed. Each time the Court attempted to clarify a rule, it expanded police power to conduct virtually limitless warrantless searches, consistently eviscerating personal privacy rights. The result is an exception originally intended to …