Law Commons^™

The Harms Of Heien: Pulling Back The Curtain On The Court's Search And Seizure Doctrine, Steven M. Goldstein -- Professor Of Law

Vanderbilt Law Review

In Heien v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court held that individuals can be seized on the basis of reasonable police mistakes of law. In an opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the eight-Justice majority held that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable” seizures does not bar legally mistaken seizures because “[t]o be reasonable is not to be perfect.” Concurring, Justice Kagan, joined by Justice Ginsburg, emphasized that judicial condonation of police mistakes of law should be “exceedingly rare.” In a solo dissent, Justice Sotomayor fairly “wonder[ed] why an innocent citizen should be made to shoulder the burden of being seized …

The Harms Of Heien: Pulling Back The Curtain On The Court's Search And Seizure Doctrin, Wayne A. Logan -- Professor

Vanderbilt Law Review

In Heien v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court held that individuals can be seized on the basis of reasonable police mistakes of law. In an opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the eight-Justice majority held that the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable" seizures does not bar legally mistaken seizures because "[t]o be reasonable is not to be perfect." Concurring, Justice Kagan, joined by Justice Ginsburg, emphasized that judicial condonation of police mistakes of law should be "exceedingly rare." In a solo dissent, Justice Sotomayor fairly "wonder[ed] why an innocent citizen should be made to shoulder the burden of being seized …

Breaking The Fourth's Wall: The Implications Of Remote Education For Students' Fourth Amendment Rights, Sallie Hatfield

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

As the COVID-19 pandemic forced both public K-12 and higher education institutions to transition to exclusively provide remote education, students’ homes and personal lives were exposed to the government like never before. Zoom classes and remote proctoring were suddenly the norm. Students and their families scrambled to create appropriate offices and classroom spaces in their homes, and many awkward and invasive scenarios soon followed. While many may have been harmlessly captured on camera, like classes that witness a student’s family eating lunch in the background or a dog on the couch, even these harmless instances have insidious implications for the …

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 …

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, Masculinities, And Judicial Acknowledgment, Nicholas J. Prendergast

Vanderbilt Law Review

In the 1980s, the Supreme Court held that courts must consider the “totality of the circumstances” when deciding the reasonableness of a police officer’s conduct in an excessive force suit. To this day, the precise meaning of “reasonableness” remains elusive. For years, courts around the country have struggled to articulate what police conduct should and—equally as saliently— should not be considered during reasonableness determinations. Thus far, the Supreme Court has been unwilling to substantively clarify its reasonableness doctrine. This lack of clarity has led to an untenable patchwork of differing legal frameworks throughout the United States.

This issue exists in …

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

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 …

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 …

Going Postal: Analyzing The Abuse Of Mail Covers Under The Fourth Amendment, Julie L. Rooney

Vanderbilt Law Review

Since at least the late 1800s, the United States government has regularly tracked the mail of many of its citizens. In 2014 alone, for example, the government recorded all data on the outside of the mail parcels of over 50,000 individuals via a surveillance initiative known as the mail covers program. In the current age of mass surveillance, this program-like all surveillance initiatives-has grown exponentially. Unbeknownst to most citizens, the government now photographs and records the exterior of each of the roughly 160 billion mail parcels delivered by the USPS every year. Still, despite its ability to allow governmental authorities …

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 …

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

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 …

The Monster Under The Bed: The Imaginary Circuit Split And The Nightmares Created In The Special Needs Doctrine's Application To Child Abuse, Adam Pie

Vanderbilt Law Review

Kessler Wilkerson was only two years old on the morning of October 16, 1976. At approximately 10:30 a.m., neighbors heard loud noises emanating from inside the Wilkerson trailer, alongside the sound of Kessler's crying and his father's screams. Two hours later, the now-quiet father delivered his two-year-old son to the emergency medical technicians. Despite their attempts to resuscitate the boy en route to the hospital, Kessler was pronounced dead on arrival. Discoveries in the hours and days that followed made Kessler's death even worse. Kessler's autopsy revealed "multiple bruises all over the child's body and.., significant bleeding and a deep …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Virtual Blinds: Finding Online Privacy In Offline Precedents, Allyson W. Haynes

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

A person in a building shows a desire for privacy by pulling her blinds shut or closing her curtains. Otherwise, she cannot complain when her neighbor sees her undressing from the window, or when a policeman looks up from the street and sees her marijuana plants. In the online context, can we find an analogy to these privacy blinds? Or is the window legally bare because of the nature of the Internet?

This Article argues that by analyzing the privacy given to communications in the offline context, and in particular, by analyzing case law recognizing privacy in an otherwise public …

Along For The Ride: Gps And The Fourth Amendment, Stephen A. Josey

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

With the advent of new technologies, the line as to where the Fourth Amendment forbids certain police behavior and when it does not has become increasingly blurred. Recently, the issue of whether police may use Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking devices to track individuals for prolonged periods of time without first securing a search warrant has crept its way into the limelight. The various circuits have arrived at different conclusions, and the question has now found its way onto the US Supreme Court's docket. After analyzing and weighing both Supreme Court case law and public policy considerations, this Note concludes …

Cloudy Privacy Protections: Why The Stored Communications Act Fails To Protect The Privacy Of Communications Stored In The Cloud, Ilana R. Kattan

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The advent of new communications technologies has generated debate over the applicability of the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement to communications sent through, and stored in, technologies not anticipated by the Framers. In 1986, Congress responded to perceived gaps in the protections of the warrant requirement as applied to newer technologies, such as email, by passing the Stored Communications Act (SCA). As originally enacted, the SCA attempted to balance the interests of law enforcement against individual privacy rights by dictating the mechanisms by which the government could compel a particular service provider to disclose communications stored on behalf of its customers. …

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 …

Justice Ginsburg's Gradualism In Criminal Procedure, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article, written for a symposium analyzing Justice Ginsburg’s jurisprudence on the 15th anniversary of her tenure on the Supreme Court, is the first sustained look at her views on criminal procedure issues (search and seizure, interrogation, the right to counsel, trial rights, sentencing procedures, and the criminal appeals and collateral review processes). Not surprisingly, given her ACLU background, she tends to vote in favor of criminal defendants’ positions more often than most other justices, and she is the most likely to do so since Chief Justice Roberts joined the Court. At the same time, the gradualist tendencies that she …

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

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 …

Applying Pen Register And Trap And Trace Devices To Internet Communications, Rich Haglund

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

This note will explain how the different surveillance methods work: wire taps, pen register and trap and trace devices. It will outline the development of case law and legislation defining what constitutes unlawful searches and seizures involving electronic communications. After explaining how email and internet addresses are collected (and whether the FBI's tool for collection works within the bounds set by the law), this note will discuss the provisions of the Patriot Act that regulate collection of that information. This note will show, using the application of pen register and trap and trace devices to the Internet as an example, …

Press One For Warrant: Reinventing The Fourth Amendment's Search Warrant Requirement Through Electronic Procedures, Justin H. Smith

Vanderbilt Law Review

Numerous rulings by the Supreme Court have confirmed the long-held assertion that the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement is a "centerpiece for the law of search and seizure, and that prescreening by neutral and detached magistrates is [at] the heart of citizens' protection against police overreaching." On September 21, 1994, however, these assertions proved inaccurate and painfully hollow for Betty Ingram, a fifty-three-year-old diabetic who awoke to the sound of armed police officers charging through her front door. The officers, who were searching for a suspect involved in a buy- and-bust operation, had neither obtained a search warrant nor knocked and …

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 …

Urine Trouble! Extending Constitutionality To Mandatory Suspicionless Drug Testing Of Students In Extracurricular Activities, James M. Mccray

Vanderbilt Law Review

The United States makes clear its reverence for education by demanding that its children attend school.' What is less clear, how- ever, is the nation's dedication to each student's constitutional rights. From the earliest days of the common law, public school students have lacked fundamental rights, even the right of liberty in its narrowest sense.' Although public students retain certain constitutional rights,' the public school system maintains an elevated power over its students." This power is like that of a parent,' including the duty to "inculcate the habits and manners of civility" into its students.' The public school's control over …

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

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" …