Law Commons^™

The Case For Rational Basis Review Of General Suspicionless Searches And Seizures, Richard C. Worf

Touro Law Review

This article examines the constitutional status of suspicionless searches and seizures of groups- an exceedingly important question in the age of terror, and a subject recently brought back to the forefront by the searches of subway passengers in New York City. It draws on process theory to argue that when a legislature has authorized a group search or seizure, courts should generally apply rational basis review.

First, other areas of constitutional doctrine exhibit deep trust in the power of groups to protect their interests in political process, and there is no reason why fourth amendment doctrine should not do the …

Rethinking Racial Profiling: A Critique Of The Economics, Civil Liberties, And Constitutional Literature, And Of Criminal Profiling More Generally, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

New reporting requirements and data collection efforts by over four hundred law enforcement agencies across the country – including entire states such as Maryland, Missouri, and Washington – are producing a continuous flow of new evidence on highway police searches. For the most part, the data consistently show disproportionate searches of African-American and Hispanic motorists in relation to their estimated representation on the road. Economists, civil liberties advocates, legal and constitutional scholars, political scientists, lawyers, and judges are poring over the new data and reaching, in many cases, quite opposite conclusions about racial profiling.

Toward An International Fourth Amendment: Rethinking Searches And Seizures Abroad After Verdugo-Urquidez, Eric Bentley, Jr.

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Should the Fourth Amendment reach abroad to protect noncitizens when United States law enforcement agents conduct searches and seizures in a foreign state? The courts have assumed this to be a closed question since 1990, when the Supreme Court, in a broadly worded plurality opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist, asserted that the Amendment protects only citizens and other members of the "national community." However, as this Article points out, the Chief Justice's plurality opinion in United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez did not represent the judgment of a majority of the Court and therefore does not foreclose continued consideration of the scope …