Fourth Amendment Commons^™

Forever Is Too Long: Rethinking Consent And Genetic Privacy Under The Fourth Amendment, Abigail Oberbeck

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

(Mis)Judging Suspicion, Sherri Lee Keene

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Twenty-five years ago, the Supreme Court decided Illinois v. Wardlow, a Fourth Amendment case that allowed the high-crime nature of a location to be considered in determinations of whether there was reasonable suspicion to support a police stop. In making these determinations, courts rarely acknowledge the role that race can play in decisions that factor in the nature of a location as context. Yet even when the race of a defendant is not mentioned, high-crime area designations can act as a proxy for race inviting racial bias into courts’ analyses. Reasonable suspicion analysis involves the interpretation of a suspect’s …

Back To The Fourth Amendment, Shea Daley Burdette

Marquette Law Review

Does the Fourth Amendment protect against governmental seizures of an individual’s digital property? The answer depends on whether government action constitutes a meaningful interference with digital property. Back to the Fourth Amendment considers the Founders’ intentional choice to use two separate words, search and seizure, to protect against governmental overreach. The Article advances an approach to the seizure analysis that protects against governmental seizures of digital property—by encouraging the Court to look at whether the government access meaningfully interfered with an owner’s right

to exclude, historically recognized as a possessory interest.

The Fourth Amendment was adopted in response to “reviled …

Standalone Frisks, Elias Neibart, Bobby Levine

Marquette Law Review

We all think we understand Terry v. Ohio. But we don’t. In fact, for decades, we’ve taken the wrong doctrinal lesson from Terry and its progeny.

Even though Terry discussed the constitutional standards surrounding “stop-and-frisks,” many of us have interpreted Terry as only permitting a “stop-and-then-a-frisk”—that is, a police officer is permitted to stop an individual on the suspicion that he is about to engage in criminal activity, and then, and only then, can that officer frisk the individual if he believes the suspect is armed and dangerous. But that’s not right. The Terry Court never said that. And …

Decoding The Path Of Constitutional Exclusion In Wisconsin Digital Evidence Cases, Amelia Boruch

Marquette Law Review

Criminal cases involving novel digital evidence warrants often raise constitutional and suppression issues. As these constitutional issues become harder to resolve, resolution of the suppression issues becomes easier to predict. Where officers obtain warrants to use cutting-edge investigative techniques in the absence of any legal authority, it is unlikely that evidence obtained pursuant to those warrants will be suppressed under the exclusionary rule. Even if the exclusionary rule were “triggered,” the good faith exception would likely apply to preclude suppression. Either way, the outcome is clear: suppression is unlikely.

Confidence in the outcome of these suppression issues has seemingly taken …

The Search Of A Search: Moderating Reverse Internet Keyword Warrants, Tui Rademaker

Northwestern University Law Review

Statistics show that Americans consistently turn to Google and other search engines to answer their most personal and private concerns, yet a new investigative tool risks law enforcement having vast discretion in the access of this data. With a keyword warrant, law enforcement can request from a search engine provider (usually Google) a list of probative search queries that users made over a specified time period. Such warrants are beginning to face legal challenges, and so far, courts seem reluctant to recognize the constitutional implications—instead leaving law enforcement with greater potential discretion over their use.

This Note assesses the constitutionality …

Replacement Opening Brief For Plaintiff-Appellant Timothy Olmos, Ciara Gerendas, Noah Goldstein, Eli O'Neal, Madeline H. Meth

Faculty Scholarship

Today, nearly everyone relies on a cellphone. Many use their phones to store a wealth of private information, including conversations over text messages and emails; photographs of family, friends, pets, and joyous occasions; and confidential banking and medical records. The Supreme Court, therefore, regards a cellphone search as one that “typically expose[s] to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house.”

The Supreme Court also recognizes that despite the legal status of people subject to probation conditions, probationers still retain Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. And this Court has held that probationers, who like almost …

Generative Suspicion And The Risks Of Ai-Assisted Police Reports, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Northwestern University Law Review

Police reports play a central role in the criminal justice system. Many times, police reports exist as the only official memorialization of what happened during an incident, shaping probable cause determinations, pretrial detention decisions, motions to suppress, plea bargains, and trial strategy. For over a century, human police officers wrote the factual narratives that shaped the trajectory of individual cases and organized the entire legal system.

This practice is about to change with the creation of AI-assisted police reports. Today, with the click of a button, large language models (LLMs), a type of generative AI using predictive text capabilities, can …

Beyond The Face: Examining Legal Regulations For Law Enforcement Facial Recognition Technology, Insun Park

Akron Law Review

No abstract provided.

Decriminalization: A New Consideration For The Fourth Amendment Balance, Maine Law Review

Maine Law Review

During the past several years Maine has reevaluated the wisdom of applying criminal sanctions to certain forms of conduct. In addition to the total abrogation of a number of crimes, the Maine Legislature has reduced the statutory classification of some offenses to civil violations. Moreover, certain newly established offenses have been limited to the status of civil violations. The designation of offenses as "civil" raises the question of what constitutional safeguards should be applied to the manner in which such violations are investigated and to the process under which civil sanctions are administered. This Comment will summarize the Supreme Court's …

The Development And Consequences Of The "Good Faith" Exception To The Exclusionary Rule And The Qualified "Good Faith" Immunity From Liability Under Section 1983, Philip M. Coffin Iii, Paul F. Driscoll

Maine Law Review

The remedies fashioned to redress violations of the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution continue to be the subject of much judicial, legislative, and scholarly inquiry. In striking the balance between the need to protect individual freedom and the need to protect society from criminal activity, the Supreme Court and Congress have developed two principal remedies for fourth amendment violations: the exclusionary rule and civil actions under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 or under theories of constitutional tort. on the development of both of these remedies it is assumed that their effectiveness is the true measure of fourth amendment liberties. …

“Are We There Yet?”: The Long Journey To Defining Motor Home Protections Under The Fourth Amendment, Ilse Ghent

Arkansas Law Review

From the time of the Revolutionary War, United States citizens have prioritized one thing over almost everything else: that “a man’s house is his castle.” This is immortalized in the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable and warrantless searches. The protections granted by the Fourth Amendment are not centered around the rights a person has in their property. Instead, “the principal object of the Fourth Amendment is the protection of privacy rather than property.” This protection is so important that the Supreme Court has been explicitly clear that warrantless searches should only be permitted in the most “exceptional” of circumstances. One …

Caught In The Crosshairs: Predictive Policing And The Use Of Force, Matthew D. Zampa

University of San Francisco Law Review

No abstract provided.

State V. Sweatt: An Examination Of The Current Confusion In Fourth Amendment Standing, John Archer Hobson

Maine Law Review

In State v. Sweatt the Maine Law Court held that an owner of gems being sold on consignment in a third party's store has standing under the fourth amendment to contest the seizure of the gems. The movants in Sweatt were the targets of several police searches during October and November of 1980. During these searches the police seized tourmaline gemstones which were alleged to have been stolen from Dale Sweatt's former business partner, and miscellaneous personal items belonging to the Sweatts. Subsequently, the Sweatts moved for suppression and return of all these articles. The superior court granted the movants' …

State V. Cloutier: Implied Invitees, Pretext And Plain View Under The Fourth Amendment, Dennis M. Doiron

Maine Law Review

Law enforcement officers often have occasion to follow the path to the front door of a residence in order to speak to its occupant. Upon answering the door, the occupant may hear a complaint about his barking dog, a query as to whether he witnessed the burglary next door, or a plea seeking support for the police department's Christmas charity drive. Occasionally, a police officer follows the path to a person's door and unexpectedly observes incriminating evidence or activities. In such cases, the police officer's conduct generates the issue of whether his observation implicates the fourth amendment's prohibition against unreasonable …

The Problem Of Third-Party Consent In Fourth Amendment Searches: Toward A "Conservative" Reading Of The Matlock Decision, Robert Deschene

Maine Law Review

In United States v. Matlock, the United States Supreme Court delivered its most recent and comprehensive statement on the doctrine of third-party consent. Under the doctrine, police may search a defendant's home or effects without first obtaining a judicially issued search warrant. Instead of this traditional prerequisite for a valid fourth amendment search, the police need only have the voluntary consent of a third person who possesses "common authority" over or a "sufficient relationship" to the area to be searched. At that point, the defendant's own consent becomes largely irrelevant. Both the United States and Maine constitutions provide protection against …

State V. Cloutier: Implied Invitees, Pretext And Plain View Under The Fourth Amendment, Dennis M. Doiron

Maine Law Review

Law enforcement officers often have occasion to follow the path to the front door of a residence in order to speak to its occupant. Upon answering the door, the occupant may hear a complaint about his barking dog, a query as to whether he witnessed the burglary next door, or a plea seeking support for the police department's Christmas charity drive. Occasionally, a police officer follows the path to a person's door and unexpectedly observes incriminating evidence or activities. In such cases, the police officer's conduct generates the issue of whether his observation implicates the fourth amendment's prohibition against unreasonable …

Crowdsourcing Surveillance, Chaz Arnett

Faculty Scholarship

In Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, Devon W. Carbado illuminates how both the spectacular and quotidian forms of racialized terror, brutality, and surveillance—characteristic of enslavement—have shaped the construction of our constitutional order. He argues that the combined social normalization and legal naturalization of racial hierarchy paved the way for the development of slave patrols and other early iterations of policing where incredible acts of violence against Black bodies were made ordinary and essential. He explains how this legacy continues today with Fourth Amendment jurisprudence not simply failing to protect rights but rather licensing police violence …

A Wolf In Sheep’S Attire: How Consent Enfeebles Our Fourth Amendment, Stephen E. Henderson, Guha Krishnamurthi

Faculty Articles

The Fourth Amendment is a mirage. On paper—in the rules studied by law students, analyzed by scholars, and proclaimed by jurists—its limitations are many and, oftentimes, significant. Yet the experience of large numbers of Americans is entirely to the contrary, thanks to the rights-annihilating, under-theorized exception of “consent.” Under its guise, law enforcement officers routinely conduct what would otherwise be constitutionally-restrained searches and seizures, and they do so without meaningful explanation or assent. Fortunately, change—whether legislative or (ideally) constitutional—could be straightforward. Thanks to other sufficient triggers, consent could be replaced by a narrow, rights-protective doctrine under which law enforcement could …

Constitutional Law—Fourth Amendment: Without Your Clothes, The Fourth Amendment Goes, Courtney Murray

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pocket Police: The Plain Feel Doctrine Thirty Years Later, Kelly Recker

Michigan Law Review

The idea that a police officer can park in a low-income neighborhood, pull someone over because of their race, frisk everyone in the car, let them go if their pockets are empty, and do the whole thing over and over again until the officer finds something illegal seems deeply upsetting and violative, to say the least. And yet, pretextual traffic stops are constitutional per a unanimous Supreme Court in Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996), as is seizing obvious contraband during a frisk per Minnesota v. Dickerson, 508 U.S. 366 (1993). In the thirty years since …

When Taint Teams Go Awry: Laundering Unconstitutional Violations Of The Fourth Amendment, Edward S. Adams, William C. Price Jr.

Arkansas Law Review

In this Article, we examine the legal landscape in which taint teams operate, why taint teams are constitutionally problematic, and propose a solution to protect the attorney-client privilege. In Part I, we will first describe what taint teams are supposed to protect—attorney-client privilege. Next, we review how a taint team gets its documents to review, namely the doctrine surrounding (secret) search warrants. Part I ends with a non exhaustive summary of remedies available when attorney-client privilege is violated during searches. In Part II, we explain the current policies and practices surrounding taint teams, including sources of procedure for taint teams …

Justice For Dogs, Alexander J. Lindvall

Arkansas Law Review

This Essay summarizes the Fourth Amendment’s protection of dogs. The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable seizures. And nearly every circuit has held that it is unreasonable (and therefore unconstitutional) for an officer to shoot (seize) a dog without a very good reason. Killing a nonthreatening family pet is one of the most egregious forms of police misconduct. The courts rightfully recognize that the unjustified harming of a dog violates the Fourth Amendment.

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

Law Faculty Scholarship

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 teststruggles 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 …

Police Brutality As Torture, Nadia Banteka

Scholarly Publications

If racial justice is the most pressing issue in America today, police brutality is the flashpoint. Incident after incident of police brutality during searches and seizures, and within jails and prisons reinforces the conviction within many communities that police harm with impunity those whom they have a duty to protect. Existing criminal statutes are filled with discretionary standards that give deference to officers while civil remedies require victims to surmount the doctrine of qualified immunity. To increase accountability for police brutality, legislatures and courts have so far focused on reducing or eliminating these procedural hurdles. But their changes have not …

Forensic Microbiome Evidence: Fourth Amendment Applications And Court Acceptance, Trason Lasley

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Search And Seizure Budgets, Kiel Brennan-Marquez, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

This article proposes a new means of restraining police power: quantitative limits on the number of law enforcement intrusions—searches and seizures—that may occur over a given period of time. Like monetary constraints, search and seizure budgets would aim to curb abusive policing and improve democratic oversight. But unlike their monetary counterparts, budgets would be indexed directly to the specific police activities that most enable escalation and abuse. What is more, budgets are a tool that finds support, conceptually, in the American framing experience. The Fourth Amendment has long been understood to require procedural limits, such as probable cause, on specific …

Exigencies, Not Exceptions: How To Return Warrant Exceptions To Their Roots, Michael Gentithes

Akron Law Faculty Publications

When a police officer interacts with an individual, the encounter is subject to myriad exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement that lack a coherent justifying theory. For instance, officers can warrantlessly search if an automobile was involved in the interaction, an arrest occurred, or a protective sweep was necessary to prevent a third- party ambush. Officers and indi viduals struggle to understand the breadth and complexity of these exceptions. The resulting confusion breeds widespread distrust and raises the tension in millions of interactions across the country. There is an easier way. The Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed its support …

How Scotus's Recent Decision On The Cheerleader Case Impacts Public School Students' Due Process Rights For Their Off-Campus Conduct, Abby Efron

St. Mary's Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Putting Together The Pieces: The Mosaic Theory And Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence Since Carpenter, Ben Vanston

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.