Fourth Amendment Commons^™

The End Of The War On Drugs, The Peace Dividend And The Renewed Fourth Amendment?, Michael Vitiello

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Presumed Punishable: Sentencing On The Streets And The Need To Protect Black Lives Through A Reinvigoration Of The Presumption Of Innocence, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, there has been a renewed focus on protecting Black people in America from excessive police violence. While the images of George Floyd were shocking to the public, that level of extreme violence and disregard for life has been a common aspect of the lives of Black Americans throughout history. In America, Black people are "pre­sumed punishable." Due to the historical and persistent biases against Black people, Black people find themselves subject to false assumptions about their criminality and presumptions that they are deserving of punishment. This stands …

Rock And Hard Place Arguments, Jareb Gleckel, Grace Brosofsky

Seattle University Law Review

This Article explores what we coin “rock and hard place” (RHP) arguments in the law, and it aims to motivate mission-driven plaintiffs to seek out such arguments in their cases. The RHP argument structure helps plaintiffs win cases even when the court views that outcome as unfavorable.

We begin by dissecting RHP dilemmas that have long existed in the American legal system. As Part I reveals, prosecutors and law enforcement officials have often taken advantage of RHP dilemmas and used them as a tool to persuade criminal defendants to forfeit their constitutional rights, confess, or give up the chance to …

On The Broadness Of The Fourth Amendment, Janine Kim

SMU Law Review

This Article considers the role of property rights in defining Fourth Amendment searches. Since United States v. Jones in 2012, the Supreme Court has relied on both privacy and property to determine whether a Fourth Amendment search has occurred. But recently, many of the Justices have expressed increasing skepticism about not only the effectiveness but also the appropriateness of safeguarding privacy. The 2018 case of Carpenter v. United States, which ruled that an individual’s cell site location information is protected under the Fourth Amendment, saw all four dissenters urging a larger role for property rights in the analysis of a …

The Fourth Amendment’S Forgotten Free-Speech Dimensions, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Facial Recognition And The Fourth Amendment, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Facial recognition offers a totalizing new surveillance power. Police now have the capability to monitor, track, and identify faces through networked surveillance cameras and datasets of billions of images. Whether identifying a particular suspect from a still photo, or identifying every person who walks past a digital camera, the privacy and security impacts of facial recognition are profound and troubling.

This Article explores the constitutional design problem at the heart of facial recognition surveillance systems. One might hope that the Fourth Amendment – designed to restrain police power and enacted to limit governmental overreach – would have something to say …

A World Of Difference? Law Enforcement, Genetic Data, And The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin, J. W. Hazel

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Law enforcement agencies are increasingly turning to genetic databases as a way of solving crime, either through requesting the DNA profile of an identified suspect from a database or, more commonly, by matching crime scene DNA with DNA profiles in a database in an attempt to identify a suspect or a family member of a suspect. Neither of these efforts implicates the Fourth Amendment, because the Supreme Court has held that a Fourth Amendment "search" does not occur unless police infringe "expectations of privacy society is prepared to recognize as reasonable" and has construed that phrase narrowly, without reference to …

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 …

Rulifying Reasonable Expectations: How Katz And Originalism Can Work Together To Create A More Determinate Fourth Amendment, Michael Gentithes

Akron Law Faculty Publications

For decades, commentators have decried the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment search jurisprudence as a hopelessly confusing jumble. Critics save their harshest barbs for the judicially created “reasonable expectations of privacy” test, suggesting that it provides little guidance and leaves search cases open to wide judicial discretion. Motivated by such critiques, several Justices have recently claimed that an originalist approach could replace the reasonable expectations test, limit judicial discretion, and clarify the Fourth Amendment’s meaning. This Article provides a comprehensive defense of the reasonable expectations test against originalist calls to abandon it. It notes two flaws in the originalist response. First, …