Fourth Amendment Commons^™

Fourth Amendment Lessons From The Highway And The Subway: A Principled Approach To Suspicionless Searches, Ricardo J. Bascuas

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The threat of future terrorist attacks has sped the proliferation of random, suspicionless searches and seizures, such as those now made of New York City subway riders. Courts assess the legality of such searches with an inherently flawed balancing test developed to assess searches and seizures made without "probable cause." Although scholars and Justices alike have decried the resort to balancing individual interests against the government's need to search, no alternative framework has been proposed. This Article proposes a more principled, objective inquiry for determining when suspicionless searches can be made. To eliminate the need for balancing, this Article advances …

Fourth Amendment Limitations On The Execution Of Computer Searches Conducted Pursuant To A Warrant, David Ziff

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Police officers and other government agents commonly seize and search computers during criminal investigations. When reviewing the search of a properly seized computer for compliance with the Fourth Amendment, courts face the complicated task of applying constitutional protections from the eighteenth century to today's computerized world. Many courts and commentators have attempted to draw analogies to old rules or invented new rules to evaluate these computer searches. This Note examines one "special approach" that some courts have adopted to limit the scope of computer searches, and concludes that this special approach is unwarranted. Rather, this Note argues that courts should …

How Earl Warren's Twenty-Two Years In Law Enforcement Affected His Work As Chief Justice, Yale Kamisar

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Before becoming governor of California, Earl Warren had spent his entire legal career, twenty-two years, in law enforcement. Professor Kamisar maintains that this experience significantly influenced Warren's work as a Supreme Court justice and gave him a unique perspective into police interrogation and other police practices. This article discusses some of Warren's experiences in law enforcement and searches for evidence of that experience in Warren's opinions. For example, when Warren was head of the Alameda County District Attorney's Office, he and his deputies not only relied on confessions in many homicide cases but also themselves interrogated homicide suspects. The seeds …

Consent Engendered: A Feminist Critique Of Consensual Fourth Amendment Searches, Dana Raigrodski

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As I will argue, the Court's consent-to-search cases are driven by this patriarchal ideology to maintain social structures of power disparities and to perpetuate the subordination of women, minorities, and other disempowered members of society.

We need to acknowledge the power and submission paradigm that underlies police-citizen encounters and to scrutinize the entire notion of consent. In order to confront both power and consent, I will turn to feminist critique of consent, particularly in the area of rape, and to feminist writings about choice and agency. Based on these writings I will argue that by distinguishing coerced consent to a …

Protecting The Citizen Whilst He Is Quiet: Suspicionless Searches, Special Needs And General Warrants, Scott E. Sundby

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No abstract provided.

In Defense Of The Search And Seizure Exclusionary Rule (Law And Truth - The Twenty-First Annual National Student Federalist Society Symposium On Law And Public Policy - 2002), Yale Kamisar

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think Dean Pye's advice about casebook writing was sound,6 and what he had to say also applies to discussions and debates about such issues as the search and seizure exclusionary rule. We cannot (at least we should not) begin with Mapp v. Ohio. We need a prelude.

The Writings Of John Barker Waite And Thomas Davies On The Search And Seizure Exclusionary Rule, Yale Kamisar

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After browsing through many volumes of the Michigan Law Review, searching for the article I would discuss on the occasion of the law review's 100th anniversary, I wound up with two "finalists": a 1955 article by Professor John Barker Waite on the law of arrest search and seizure (on further reflection, four Michigan Law Review commentaries on the general subject written by Waite between 1933 and 1955)' and a monumental 200-page article (surely one of the longest articles ever to appear in the Michigan Law Review) by Thomas Davies on the "original Fourth Amendment. 2

Kyllo V. United States And The Partial Ascendance Of Justice Scalia's Fourth Amendment, Richard Henry Seamon

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Breaking Out Of "Custody": A Feminist Voice In Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Dana Raigrodski

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In this Essay, I suggest that reexamination of this field of law through a feminist lens can shed new light and add to the understanding of constitutional criminal procedure. These insights, in turn, can and should generate a positive feminist jurisprudence of criminal procedure—a distinctive feminist voice to be integrated systematically into our constitutional criminal procedure and our criminal justice system. Applying feminist legal theories to particular areas of constitutional criminal procedure may help guide us through the more difficult task of constructing a positive feminist jurisprudence of constitutional criminal procedure. Many areas of constitutional criminal procedure lend themselves as …

Confessions, Search And Seizure And The Rehnquist Court, Yale Kamisar

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About the time William Rehnquist ascended to the Chief Justiceship of the United States, two events occurred that increased the likelihood that Miranda would enjoy a long life. In Moran v. Burbine,' a 6-3 majority held that a confession preceded by an otherwise valid waiver of a suspect's Miranda rights should not be excluded either (a) because the police misled an inquiring attorney when they told her they were not going to question the suspect she called about or (b) because the police failed to inform the suspect of the attorney's efforts to reach him.

Enforcing Family Promises: Reliance, Reciprocity, And Relational Contract, Melanie B. Leslie

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Courts are willing, in commercial contexts, to enforce promises even without consideration when enforcement supports a norm of reciprocity-a norm which recognizes that promises are seldom totally gratuitous, but are often made in furtherance of reciprocal, long-term, trust-based relationships. In this article, Professor Leslie argues that relational contract principles are firmly embedded in wills law. Courts enforce the reciprocity norm in the family context just as they do in commercial contexts; this enforcement is seen, however, not in breach of promise suits, which occur rarely between family members, but rather in will contests. Despite the prevalent ideology of wills law, …

An Ode To Probable Cause: A Brief Response To Professors Amar And Slobogin, Scott E. Sundby

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No abstract provided.

The Warren Court And Criminal Justice: A Quarter-Century Retrospective, Yale Kamisar

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Many commentators have observed that when we speak of "the Warren Court," we mean the Warren Court that lasted from 1962 (when Arthur Goldberg replaced Felix Frankfurter) to 1969 (when Earl Warren retired). But when we speak of the Warren Court's "revolution" in American criminal procedure we mean the Warren Court that lasted from 1961 (when the landmark case of Mapp v. Ohio was decided) to 1966 or 1967. In its final years, the Warren Court was not the same Court that had handed down Mapp or Miranda v. Arizona.

Everyman's Fourth Amendment: Privacy Or Mutual Trust Between Government And Citizen, Scott E. Sundby

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The Fourth Amendment And Its Exclusionary Rule, Yale Kamisar

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"The history of liberty," Justice Felix Frankfurter once noted, "has largely been the history of observance of procedural safeguards" and "the history of the destruction of liberty," Professor Anthony Amsterdam has added, "has largely been the history of the relaxation of those safeguards in the face of plausible sounding governmental claims of a need to deal with widely frightening and emotion freighted threats to the good order of society." These plausible-sounding government claims are being heard today -and they are putting enormous pressure on the Fourth Amendment, the constitutional provision that protects "the right of the people to be secure …

Beyond Griswold: Foucauldian And Republican Approaches To Privacy, Stephen J. Schnably

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Remembering The 'Old World' Of Criminal Procedure: A Reply To Professor Grano, Yale Kamisar

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When I graduated from high school in 1961, the "old world" of criminal procedure still existed, albeit in its waning days; when I graduated from law school in 1968, circa the time most of today's first-year law students were arriving on the scene, the "new world" had fully dislodged the old. Indeed, the force of the new world's revolutionary impetus already had crested. Some of the change that the criminal procedure revolution effected was for the better, but much of it, at least as some of us see it, was decidedly for the worse. My students, however, cannot make the …

A Return To Fourth Amendment Basics: Undoing The Mischief Of Camara And Terry, Scott E. Sundby

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'Comparative Reprehensibility' And The Fourth Amendment Exclusionary Rule, Yale Kamisar

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It is not . . . easy to see what the shock-the-conscience test adds, or should be allowed to add, to the deterrent function of exclusionary rules. Where no deterrence of unconstitutional police behavior is possible, a decision to exclude probative evidence with the result that a criminal goes free to prey upon the public should shock the judicial conscience even more than admitting the evidence. So spoke Judge Robert H. Bork, concurring in a ruling that the fourth amendment exclusionary rule does not apply to foreign searches conducted exclusively by foreign officials. A short time thereafter, when an interviewer …

Shared Privacy And The Fourth Amendment, Or The Rights Of Relationships, Mary I. Coombs

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No abstract provided.

Edward L. Barrett, Jr.: The Critic With 'That Quality Of Judiciousness Demanded Of The Court Itself', Yale Kamisar

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Barrett was as talented and as dedicated a law teacher as any of his distinguished (or soon-to-become-distinguished) contemporaries. But Barrett resisted the movement toward new rights in fields where none had existed before. At least, he was quite uneasy about the trend. To be sure, others in law teaching shared Barrett's concern that the clock was spinning too fast. Indeed, some others were quite vociferous about it.' But because his criticism was cerebral rather than emotional - because he fairly stated and fully explored the arguments urging the courts to increase their tempo in developing constitutional rights - Barrett was …

Unreasonable Searches And Seizures Of Papers, Eric Schnapper

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This article argues that the Supreme Court's original view of the history and meaning of the fourth amendment was correct: seizures of papers were condemned in eighteenth-century England without respect to the validity of any underlying warrant, and the search and seizure clause thus embodies requirements independent of the warrant clause.

Part I discusses the eighteenth-century English decisions, including Entick, and concludes that the case law of that era had two separate branches. One branch forbade general warrants and led to the adoption of the warrant clause; the other, exemplified by Entick, prohibited the seizure of certain papers …

Introduction: Trends And Developments With Respect To That Amendment 'Central To Enjoyment Of Other Guarantees Of The Bill Of Rights', Yale Kamisar

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Seventy years ago, in the famous Weeks case,' the Supreme Court evoked a storm of controversy by promulgating the federal exclusionary rule. When, a half-century later, in the landmark Mapp case,2 the Court extended the Weeks rule to state criminal proceedings, at least one experienced observer assumed that the controversy "today finds its end." 3 But as we all know now, Mapp only intensified the controversy. Indeed, in recent years spirited debates over proposals to modify the exclusionary rule or to scrap it entirely have filled the air - and the law reviews.'

Gates, 'Probable Cause', 'Good Faith', And Beyond, Yale Kamisar

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Illinois v. Gates1 was the most eagerly awaited constitutional-criminal procedure case of the 1982 Term. I think it fair to say, however, that it was awaited a good deal more eagerly by law enforcement officials and the Americans for Effective Law Enforcement than by defense lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union. As it turned out, of course, the Gates Court, to the disappointment of many, did not reach the question whether the exclusionary rule in search and seizure cases should be modified so as not to require the exclusion of evidence obtained in violation of the fourth amendment when …

Does (Did) (Should) The Exclusionary Rule Rest On A 'Principled Basis' Rather Than An 'Empirical Proposition'?, Yale Kamisar

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[U]ntil the [exclusionary rule] rests on a principled basis rather than an empirical proposition, [the rule] will remain in a state of unstable equilibrium. Mapp v. Ohio, which overruled the then twelve-year-old Wolf case and imposed the fourth amendment exclusionary rule (the Weeks doctrine) on the states as a matter of fourteenth amendment due process, seemed to mark the end of an era. Concurring in Mapp, Justice Douglas recalled that Wolf had evoked "a storm of constitutional controversy which only today finds its end."' But in the two decades since Justice Douglas made this observation, the storm of controversy has …

Search And Seizure Of America: The Case For Keeping The Exclusionary Rule, Yale Kamisar

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Twenty years ago, concurring in Mapp v. Ohio (1961), Justice William 0. Douglas looked back on Wolf v. Colorado (1949) (which had held that the Fourth Amendment's substantive protection against "unreasonable search and seizure" was binding on the states through the due process clause, but that the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule was not) and recalled that the Wolf case had evoked "a storm of controversy which only today finds its end." But, of course, in the twenty years since Justice Douglas made that observation the storm of controversy has only intensified, and it has engulfed the exclusionary rule in federal …

How We Got The Fourth Amendment Exclusionary Rule And Why We Need It, Yale Kamisar

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Why the continuing storm of controversy over the exclusionary rule? Why the deep and widespread hostility to it? I think a recent law office search case, because it arose in a setting so unlike the typical search and seizure case, furnishes a clue. In O'Connor v. Johnson, St. Paul police obtained a warrant to search an attorney's office for business records of a client suspected of making false written statements in applying for a liquor license. The attorney happened to be present when the police arrived. Holding on to his work product file, which contained some of the records sought, …

Full Faith And Credit, More Or Less, To Judgments: Doubts About Thomas V. Washington Gas Light Co., Stewart E. Sterk

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Workmen's compensation awards, decrees of administrative tribunals rather than courts, present the question of how far the mandate of the full faith and credit clause should reach and whether the clause should bar a claimant from pursuing supplemental compensation in a second state. Recently, in Thomas v. Washington Gas Light Co., the Supreme Court decided that full faith and credit should not prevent a claimant from obtaining supplemental compensation. Professor Sterk criticizes the Court's analysis, demonstrating the Thomas Court's neglect of the federal interests that the clause should protect. After examining the clause and its policy underpinnings, Professor Sterk …

Standing Up For Fourth Amendment Rights: Salvucci, Rawlings, And The Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy (Comment), Elizabeth Brandt

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The initial inquiry a court must make before considering a motion to suppress evidence based on an unreasonable search and seizure is whether the individual has standing under the fourth amendment. This Note examines the historical development of the standing doctrines leading to the reasonable expectation of privacy test adopted by the Supreme Court in Rakas v. Illinois. The Note also identifies the problems created by the Court's far-reaching application of this test. The author concludes that the overall effect of recent decisions may be to limit the number of defendants able to assert fourth amendment claims, since suppression hearing …

High On The Seas: Drug Smuggling, The Fourth Amendment, And Warrantless Searches At Sea, Daniel H. Foote

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Today no statute prohibits the mere possession of marijuana or other controlled substances beyond the three-mile offshore territorial limit of the United States; but prosecutions relating to vessels carrying controlled substances outside the territorial waters may be based upon charges of conspiracy to import or distribute the substances. In attempting to halt the recent increase in smuggling of such contraband by sea, the United States Coast Guard and other law enforcement agencies have aggressively exercised their powers to stop and search vessels. Two parallel statutory provisions, 14 U.S.C. § 89(a) and 19 U.S.C. § 158,(a), give the Coast Guard and …