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The Aftermath Of Carpenter: An Empirical Study Of Fourth Amendment Law, 2018-2021, Matthew Tokson

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Fourth Amendment law is in flux. The Supreme Court recently established, in the landmark case Carpenter v. United States, that individuals can retain Fourth Amendment rights in information they disclose to a third party. In the internet era, this ruling has the potential to extend privacy protections to a huge variety of sensitive digital information. But Carpenter is also notoriously vague. Scholars and lower courts have tried to guess at what the law of Fourth Amendment searches will be going forward—and have reached different, contradictory conclusions.

This Article reports the results of a large-scale empirical study of the impact of …