Fourth Amendment Commons^™

Beyond Law Enforcement: Camreta V. Greene, Child Protection Investigations, And The Need To Reform The Fourth Amendment Special Needs Doctrine, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

The Fourth Amendment “special needs” doctrine distinguishes between searches and seizures that serve the “normal need for law enforcement” and those that serve some other special need, excusing non-law-enforcement searches and seizures from the warrant and probable cause requirements. The United States Supreme Court has never justified drawing this bright line exclusively around law enforcement searches and seizures but not around those that threaten important noncriminal constitutional rights.

Child protection investigations illustrate the problem: millions of times each year, state child protection authorities search families' homes and seize children for interviews about alleged maltreatment. Only a minority of these investigations …

Predictive Policing And Reasonable Suspicion, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Predictive policing is a new law enforcement strategy to reduce crime by predicting criminal activity before it happens. Using sophisticated computer algorithms to forecast future events from past crime patterns, predictive policing has become the centerpiece of a new smart-policing strategy in several major cities. The initial results have been strikingly successful in reducing crime.This article addresses the Fourth Amendment consequences of this police innovation, analyzing the effect of predictive policing on the concept of reasonable suspicion. This article examines predictive policing in the context of the larger constitutional framework of “prediction” and the Fourth Amendment. Many aspects of current …

Technological Leap, Statutory Gap, And Constitutional Abyss: Remote Biometric Identification Comes Of Age, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Federal interest in using facial recognition technology (“FRT”) to collect, analyze, and use biometric information is rapidly growing. Despite the swift movement of agencies and contractors into this realm, however, Congress has been virtually silent on the current and potential uses of FRT. No laws directly address facial recognition—much less the pairing of facial recognition with video surveillance—in criminal law. Limits placed on the collection of personally identifiable information, moreover, do not apply. The absence of a statutory framework is a cause for concern. FRT represents the first of a series of next generation biometrics, such as hand geometry, iris, …

Searching Secrets, Nita A. Farahany

Faculty Scholarship

A Fourth Amendment violation has traditionally involved a physical intrusion such as the search of a house or the seizure of a person or her papers. Today, investigators rarely need to break down doors, rummage through drawers, or invade one’s peace and repose to obtain incriminating evidence in an investigation. Instead, the government may unobtrusively intercept information from electronic files, GPS transmissions, and intangible communications. In the near future, it may even be possible to intercept information directly from suspects’ brains. Courts and scholars have analogized modern searches for information to searches of tangible property like containers and have treated …

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 …