Law Commons^™

Katz Or Dogs? Why The Katz Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy Test Is More Applicable To Advancing Technology Than A Test Applied To Dog Sniffs, Blade M. Allen

Student Published Scholarship

Most often, when law enforcement agencies or governments use a person’s DNA or genetic information, they do so in the pursuit of justice. That said, there are privacy concerns that arise when the government or police have open access to any person’s DNA or genetic information, especially through the Internet. This article attempts to present an argument for a reasonable expectation of privacy (REP) in a person’s genetic information or DNA as well as other forms of advancing technology. It begins with a history of the US Supreme Court’s interpretations of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, continues with …

Searches Without Suspicion: Avoiding A Four Million Person Underclass, Tonja Jacobi, Addie Maguire

Faculty Articles

In Samson v. California, the Supreme Court upheld warrantless, suspicionless searches for parolees. That determination was controversial both because suspicionless searches are, by definition, anathema to the Fourth Amendment, and because they arguably undermine parolees’ rehabilitation. Less attention has been given to the fact that the implications of the case were not limited to parolees. The opinion in Samson included half a sentence of dicta that seemingly swept probationers into its analysis, implicating the rights of millions of additional people in the United States. Not only is analogizing parolees and probationers not logically sound because the two groups differ …

A New Test For The New Crime Exception, Colin Miller

Faculty Publications

The new crime exception to the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule allows prosecutors to introduce evidence connected to new crimes committed by defendants who were illegally detained and/or questioned. Unfortunately, as illustrated in this Article, courts largely have applied this new crime exception without any analytical framework or regard for the severity of the initial police misconduct or the defendant’s response. Moreover, courts have begun applying the new crime exception to crimes such as giving a fake name in response to an un-Mirandized interrogation following a lawful arrest.

By doing so, courts have allowed the new crime exception to swallow two …

When Dirty Data Leads To Dirty Policing, Madison Blevins

Law Student Publications

"On May 25th, 2020, George Floyd was tragically killed by police officers in Minneapolis. While George Floyd’s death was the shock that catapulted the Black Lives Matter (“BLM”) movement to the center of international attention, it was also just the tip of the iceberg. Floyd’s death was not the first death of a black person at the hands of the police, nor would it be the last. “A black person is killed by a police officer in America at a rate of more than one [person] every other day.” These repeated incidents across the country have ignited a mass movement …

On Warrants & Waiting: Electronic Warrants & The Fourth Amendment, Tracy Hresko Pearl

Indiana Law Journal

Police use of electronic warrant (“e-warrant”) technology has increased significantly in recent years. E-warrant technology allows law enforcement to submit, and magistrate judges to review and approve, warrant applications on computers, smartphones, and tablets, often without any direct communication. Police officers report that they favor e-warrants over their traditional, paper counterparts because they save officers a significant amount of time in applying for warrants by eliminating the need to appear in-person before a magistrate. Legal scholars have almost uniformly praised e-warrant technology as well, arguing that use of these systems will increase the number of warrants issued throughout the United …

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 …

Is Wide-Area Persistent Surveillance By State And Local Governments Constitutional?, Joseph Lake

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the following question: “Can wide-area persistent surveillance (WAPS) developed by the United States military and employed abroad as a tool in the Global War on Terror be employed domestically as a law enforcement tool without violating the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment?” The most likely and controversial application of WAPS by state and local governments is for law enforcement. Aircraft will loiter over a city persistently taking high-definition photographs to capture locations of unidentified persons with the intent to identify persons and areas of interest for criminal investigations. Based on the Flyover Cases, aerial surveillance has few constitutional …

Is There A Fundamental Right To Privacy When An Educational Institution Requires A Student To Disclose Proof Of His Or Her Vaccination Status?, Mary D. Fatscher

Touro Law Review

In 2020, the coronavirus disease (“COVID-19”) dominated the world. Although the public has progressively become more informed about the disease and how to safeguard itself, challenges persist as there is still much unknown. Aside from wearing masks, social distancing, and despite its undetermined consequences, the COVID-19 vaccination has emerged as a primary solution to substantially reducing the incidence and severity of the virus in our country. Many COVID-19 vaccine mandates were initiated once three pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies including Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson received Emergency Use Authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”).

Evolving Privacy Protections For Emerging Machine Learning Data Under Carpenter V. United States, Emily Nicolella

FIU Law Review

The Fourth Amendment’s third-party doctrine eliminates an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy in information they willingly turn over to third parties. Government scrutiny of this information is not considered a search under the Fourth Amendment and is therefore not given constitutional protections. In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court created an exception to the third-party doctrine. In Carpenter, a case involving the warrantless use of cell site location information (CSLI) in a criminal investigation, the Court held that individuals do have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding CSLI. According to Chief Justice Roberts, despite the necessary …

Warranted Exclusion: A Case For A Fourth Amendment Built On The Right To Exclude, Mailyn Fidler

SMU Law Review

Searches intrude; fundamentally, they infringe on a right to exclude. So that right should form the basis of Fourth Amendment protections. Current Fourth Amendment doctrine—the reasonable expectation of privacy test—struggles with conceptual clarity and predictability. The Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade casts further doubt on the reception of other privacy-based approaches with this Court. But the replacement approach that several Justices on the Court favor, what I call the “maximalist” property approach, risks troublingly narrow results. This Article provides a new alternative: Fourth Amendment protection should be anchored in a flexible concept derived from property law—what …

The Fourth Amendment's Constitutional Home, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

The home enjoys omnipresent status in American constitutional law. The Bill of Rights, peculiarly, has served as the central refuge for special protections to the home. This constitutional sanctuary has elicited an intriguing textual and doctrinal puzzle. A distinct thread has emerged that runs through the first five amendments delineating the home as a zone where rights emanating from speech, smut, gods, guns, soldiers, searches, sex, and self-incrimination enjoy special protections. However, the thread inexplicably unravels upon arriving at takings. There, the constitutional text omits and the Supreme Court’s doctrine excludes a special zone of safeguards to the home. This …

The Empty Promise Of The Fourth Amendment In The Family Regulation System, Anna Arons

Faculty Publications

Each year, state agents search the homes of hundreds of thousands of families across the United States under the auspices of the family regulation system. Through these searches—required elements of investigations into allegations of child maltreatment in virtually every jurisdiction—state agents invade the home, the most protected space in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Accordingly, federal courts agree that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement applies to family regulation home searches. But almost universally, the abstract recognition of Fourth Amendment protections runs up against a concrete expectation on the ground that state actors should have easy and expansive access to families’ homes. Legislatures …

The Fourth Amendment And General Law, Daniel Epps, Danielle D'Onfro

Scholarship@WashULaw

For decades, Fourth Amendment protections have turned on “reasonable expectations of privacy.” But a new era may be dawning. There is growing interest among judges and scholars in turning away from privacy toward property or positive law as the touchstone for Fourth Amendment protections. Yet many questions remain about how that approach should work, such as where judges should look for positive law and precisely what role positive law should play in Fourth Amendment analysis.

This Article answers those questions, and in so doing lays forth a new, comprehensive theory of the Fourth Amendment. We argue that courts should interpret …

Privacy And National Politics: Fingerprint And Dna Litigation In Japan And The United States Compared, Dongsheng Zang

Articles

Drawing cases from two related areas of law-fingerprint and DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) data-this Article proposes a modified framework, built on the Balkin-Levinson emphasis on national politics: First, national politics understood as partisan rivalry cannot account for what I call doctrinal lock-in in this Article, where I will demonstrate that in different stages of American politics-the Lochner era, the New Deal era, and Civil Rights era-courts across the nation ruled predominantly in favor of public data collectors-state and federal law enforcement in fingerprint cases. From the 1990s, when DNA data became hot targets of law enforcement, the United States Supreme Court …

The Carpenter Test As A Transformation Of Fourth Amendment Law, Matthew Tokson

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

For over fifty years, the Fourth Amendment’s scope has been largely dictated by the Katz test, which applies the Amendment’s protections only when the government has violated a person’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.” This vague standard is one of the most criticized doctrines in all of American law, and its lack of coherence has made Fourth Amendment search law notoriously confusing. Things have become even more complex following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Carpenter v. United States, which has spawned its own alternative test for determining the Fourth Amendment’s scope. The emerging Carpenter test looks to the revealing nature …

The Carceral Home, Kate Weisburd

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In virtually all areas of law, the home is the ultimate constitutionally protected area, at least in theory. In practice, a range of modern institutions that target private life—from public housing to child welfare—have turned the home into a routinely surveilled space. Indeed, for the 4.5 million people on criminal court supervision, their home is their prison, or what I call a “carceral home.” Often in the name of decarceration, prison walls are replaced with restrictive rules that govern every aspect of private life and invasive surveillance technology that continuously records intimate information. While prisons have always been treated in …

Policing "Bad" Mothers, I. Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers — a speculative novel about a mother who abandons her child for a few hours and is required to attend a school for good mothers to regain custody — may not be a great book, but it is a good yarn, and a page turner, and thought-provoking. Thought-provoking, because to measure her fitness to be a mother, the protagonist is assigned a robot doppelganger of her child — one that is sentient, one that seems almost real, one that might even pass the Turing test, and one that she is required not only …

Are Police Officers Bayesians? Police Updating In Investigative Stops, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Lila J.E. Nojima

Faculty Scholarship

Theories of rational behavior assume that actors make decisions where the benefits of their acts exceed their costs or losses. If those expected costs and benefits change over time, behavior will change accordingly as actors learn and internalize the parameters of success and failure. In the context of proactive policing, police stops that achieve any of several goals — constitutional compliance, stops that lead to “good” arrests or summonses, stops that lead to seizures of weapons, drugs, or other contraband, or stops that produce good will and citizen cooperation — should signal to officers the features of a stop that …

Scanning Iphones To Save Children: Apple’S On-Device Hashing Algorithm Should Survive A Fourth Amendment Challenge, Timothy Gernand

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

When Apple announced it would combat the growth of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on its platform by scanning all its users’ devices without their consent, many of its loyal customers felt betrayed. With tech companies such as Google and Facebook arranging their business models around selling their customers’ personal information, Apple customers saw the company’s focus on privacy as a refreshing alternative. However, as Apple itself privately acknowledged, this emphasis on privacy had led to it becoming a haven for CSAM. Despite the reputational damage it would incur with its customers, Apple resolved to confront CSAM on its platform …

Beware What You Google: Fourth Amendment Constitutionality Of Keyword Warrants, Chelsa Camille Edano

Washington Law Review

Many Americans have potentially had their privacy rights invaded through invisible, widespread police searches. In recent years, local and federal governments have compelled Google and other search engine companies to produce the personal information of users who have conducted a search query related to a crime. By using keyword warrants, the government can conduct a dragnet search for suspects, imposing suspicion on users and exposing their personal information. The keyword warrant is a symptom of the erosion of the Fourth Amendment protection against suspicionless searches. Not only is scholarship scarce on keyword warrants, but also instances of these warrants are …

The Fourth Amendment And The Problem Of Social Cost, Thomas P. Crocker

Northwestern University Law Review

The Supreme Court has made social cost a core concept relevant to the calculation of Fourth Amendment remedies but has never explained the concept’s meaning. The Court limits the availability of both the exclusionary rule and civil damages because of their “substantial social costs.” According to the Court, these costs primarily consist of letting the lawbreaker go free by excluding evidence or deterring effective police practices that would lead to more criminal apprehension and prosecution. But recent calls for systemic police reform by social movements have a different view of social cost. So too do calls for reforming qualified immunity. …

Wiretapping The Internet: Analyzing The Application Of The Federal Wiretap Act’S Party Exception Online, Hayden Driscoll

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The federal Wiretap Act—originally enacted to curtail the government’s unbridled use of wiretaps to monitor telephonic communications—was amended in 1986 to provide a private right of action, extending the Act’s Fourth Amendment-like protections to private intrusions. Since the advent of the internet, plaintiffs have attempted to predicate claims of unauthorized online privacy intrusions on the Wiretap Act. In response, defendants claim they are parties to the communications at issue and should be absolved of liability under the Act’s party exception. The federal circuit courts of appeal disagree on how the party exception applies in the internet context. This Note evaluates …

Constitutional Law—Fourth Amendment—Warrantless Key-Test Searches In Residential Door Locks, Jacob Hill

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legal Implications Of A Ubiquitous Metaverse And A Web3 Future, Jon M. Garon

Marquette Law Review

The metaverse is understood to be an immersive virtual world serving as the locus for all forms of work, education, and entertainment experiences. Depicted in books, movies, and games, the metaverse has the potential not just to supplement real-world experiences but to substantially supplant them. This Article explores the rapid emergence and evolution of the Web3 technologies at the heart of the metaverse movement. Web3 itself is a paradigmatic shift in internet commerce.

Criminal Procedure—Technology In The Modern Era: The Implications Of Carpenter V. United States And The Limits Of The Third-Party Doctrine As To Cell Phone Data Gathered Through Real-Time Tracking, Stingrays, And Cell Tower Dumps, Deepali Lal

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rewriting Whren V. United States, Jonathan Feingold, Devon Carbado

Faculty Scholarship

In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Whren v. United States—a unanimous opinion in which the Court effectively constitutionalized racial profiling. Despite its enduring consequences, Whren remains good law today. This Article rewrites the opinion. We do so, in part, to demonstrate how one might incorporate racial justice concerns into Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, a body of law that has long elided and marginalized the racialized dimensions of policing. A separate aim is to reveal the “false necessity” of the Whren outcome. The fact that Whren was unanimous, and that even progressive Justices signed on, might lead one to conclude that …

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 …

A Solution For The Third-Party Doctrine In A Time Of Data Sharing, Contact Tracing, And Mass Surveillance, Tonja Jacobi, Dustin Stonecipher

Notre Dame Law Review

Today, information is shared almost constantly. People share their DNA to track their ancestry or for individualized health information; they instruct Alexa to purchase products or provide directions; and, now more than ever, they use videoconferencing technology in their homes. According to the third-party doctrine, the government can access all such information without a warrant or without infringing on Fourth Amendment privacy protections. This exposure of vast amounts of highly personal data to government intrusion is permissible because the Supreme Court has interpreted the third-party doctrine as a per se rule. However, that interpretation rests on an improper understanding of …

The Computer Got It Wrong: Facial Recognition Technology And Establishing Probable Cause To Arrest, T.J. Benedict

Washington and Lee Law Review

Facial recognition technology (FRT) is a popular tool among police, who use it to identify suspects using photographs or still-images from videos. The technology is far from perfect. Recent studies highlight that many FRT systems are less effective at identifying people of color, women, older people, and children. These race, gender, and age biases arise because FRT is often “trained” using non-diverse faces. As a result, police have wrongfully arrested Black men based on mistaken FRT identifications. This Note explores the intersection of facial recognition technology and probable cause to arrest.

Courts rarely, if ever, examine FRT’s role in establishing …

Wrongfully Charged, Golden Gate University School Of Law

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

On January 10, 2020, a San Francisco Superior Court judge, at the request of a San Francisco Police officer, issued an arrest warrant in connection with a residential burglary. Mot. Suppress Evid. Off’d Against Def. Prelim. Hr’g, 6:1-2. The warrant listed suspects to be arrested and described a residence in Oakland that was to be searched. Id. at 3:5-13. The San Francisco Police Department sent a special operations unit to execute the warrant. Id. at 10:13-22. When the officers arrived at the house, they found the suspect as well as other individuals in the house.

One of those individuals was …