Fourth Amendment Commons^™

The Exclusionary Rule In The Age Of Blue Data, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In Herring v. United States, Chief Justice John Roberts reframed the Supreme Court’s understanding of the exclusionary rule: “As laid out in our cases, the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence.” The open question remains: how can defendants demonstrate sufficient recurring or systemic negligence to warrant exclusion? The Supreme Court has never answered the question, although the absence of systemic or recurring problems has figured prominently in two recent exclusionary rule decisions. Without the ability to document recurring failures, or patterns of police misconduct, courts can dismiss …

Reforming Institutions: The Judicial Function In Bankruptcy And Public Law Litigation, Kathleen G. Noonan, Jonathan C. Lipson, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Public law litigation (PLL) is among the most important and controversial types of dispute that courts face. These civil class actions seek to reform public agencies such as police departments, prison systems, and child welfare agencies that have failed to meet basic statutory or constitutional obligations. They are controversial because critics assume that judicial intervention is categorically undemocratic or beyond judicial expertise.

This Article reveals flaws in these criticisms by comparing the judicial function in PLL to that in corporate bankruptcy, where the value and legitimacy of judicial intervention are better understood and more accepted. Our comparison shows that judicial …

Evolving Autonomous Vehicle Technology And The Erosion Of Privacy, Raquel Toral

University of Miami Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

Psychosocial Analysis Of An Ethnography At The Cuyahoga County Public Defenders Office, Ernest M. Oleksy

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

Too often, social science majors become jaded with their field of study due to a misperception of the nature of many potential jobs which they are qualified for. Such discord is prevalent amongst undergraduates who strive for work in the criminal justice system. Hollywood misrepresentations become the archetypes of the aforementioned field, leaving out the necessity and ubiquity of accompanying desk work. Still other social science majors struggle to identify theoretical interpretations in praxis.

Sb 336 - Law Enforcement Officers And Agencies, Richard J. Uberto Jr., Brooke Wilner

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act prohibits data carriers from disclosing to their customers the existence of a subpoena issued for the production of the customers’ records. The Act also allows the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to retain the fingerprints of individuals working in certain professions that require background checks for the duration of employment.

Dialing It Back: Why Courts Should Rethink Students’ Privacy And Speech Rights As Cell Phone Communications Erode The ‘Schoolhouse Gate’, Nicholas J. Mcguire

Duke Law & Technology Review

The ubiquity of cell phones in today’s society has forced courts to change or dismiss established, but inapplicable analytical frameworks. Two such frameworks in the school setting are regulations of student speech and of student searches. This Article traces the constitutional jurisprudence of both First Amendment off-campus speech protection and Fourth Amendment search standards as applied to the school setting. It then analyzes how the Supreme Court’s ruling in Riley v. California complicates both areas. Finally, it proposes a pragmatic solution: by recognizing a categorical First Amendment exception for “substantial threats” against the school community, courts could accommodate students’ constitutional …

Property, Persons, And Institutionalized Police Interdiction In Byrd V. United States, Eric J. Miller

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

During a fairly routine traffic stop of a motorist driving a rental car, two State Troopers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, discovered that the driver, Terrence Byrd, was not the listed renter. The Court ruled that Byrd nonetheless retained a Fourth Amendment right to object to the search. The Court did not address, however, why the Troopers stopped Byrd in the first place. A close examination of the case filings reveal suggests that Byrd was stopped on the basis of his race. The racial feature ofthe stop is obscured by the Court’s current property-basedinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy.

Although …

Perceptions, Knowledge And Experiences Among Police Officers: Traffic Stops, Vehicle Searches And K-9 Involvement, Daniel Ozment

Master of Science in Criminal Justice Theses & (Pre-2016) Policy Research Projects

This survey study explores the perceptions, knowledge and experiences of police “line” officers concerning Fourth Amendment search and seizure norms and applications during traffic stops and vehicles searches, in particular police use of canine units following the landmark United States Supreme Court decision of Rodriguez v. United States. In particular, the study examines issues surrounding the length and scope of a traffic stop by police, including stops with canine involvement. Finally, the study includes an analysis of how federal courts of appeal and Georgia courts have interpreted the Rodriguez decision.

The Common Law Endures In The Fourth Amendment, George C. Thomas Iii

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The text of the Fourth Amendment provides no guidance about what makes a search unreasonable or when warrants are required to make a search reasonable. The Supreme Court has had to craft a doctrine based on intuition, policy goals, and halfhearted stabs at history. This Article argues that the Court’s Fourth Amendment doctrine is stable when it roughly tracks the eighteenth-century common law protection of property, privacy, and liberty. When the Court has sought to provide more protection than the common law provided, the result has been an erratic doctrine that has gradually receded almost back to the common law …

The Stored Communications Act: Property Law Enforcement Tool Or Instrument Of Oppression?, Raymond Boyce

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Cognitive Theory Of The Third-Party Doctrine And Digital Papers, H. Brian Holland

Faculty Scholarship

For nearly 200 years, an individual’s personal papers enjoyed near-absolute protection from government search and seizure. That is no longer the case. With the widespread adoption of cloud-based information processing and storage services, the third-party doctrine operates to effectively strip our digital papers of meaningful Fourth Amendment protections.

This Article presents a new approach to reconciling current third-party doctrine with the technological realities of modern personal information processing. Our most sensitive data is now processed and stored on cloud computing systems owned and operated by third parties. Although we may consider these services to be private and generally secure, the …

Out Of The “Serbonian Bog” Surrounding Government Acquisition Of Third-Party Cell Site Location Information: “Get A Warrant”, Glenn Williams

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Elusive Constitutional Right To Informational Privacy, Larry J. Pittman

Nevada Law Journal

Today, at any moment, many Americans are subject to having their private information stolen or otherwise used without their consent. This Article will discuss the specifics of a constitutional right to informational privacy theory, and a civil lawsuit remedy for the unauthorized governmental use of one’s private information. The Fourth Amendment is the most logical constitutional source for this privacy theory; and, a governmental entity, to justify its unauthorized use of private information, must satisfy the strict scrutiny standard by showing a compelling governmental interest that cannot be satisfied by a less intrusive alternative.

As a part of this discussion, …

From Storefront To Dashboard: The Use Of The Americans With Disabilities Act To Govern Websites, Kelby S. Carlson

Catholic University Law Review

The question of the effects of technological change on the interpretation of statutes is a complicated one. Particularly for statutes that govern a broad range of issues, the advent of new technology can precipitate re-examination of the rationale behind, and nature of, the relevant law. The Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted, in part, to give Americans with disabilities greater access to public space, allowing them to enjoy the advantages such access offers on an equal footing with the able-bodied. The adoption of digital technology across society and, in particular, the widespread ubiquity of the internet now raise questions about …

Chilling: The Constitutional Implications Of Body-Worn Cameras And Facial Recognition Technology At Public Protests, Julian R. Murphy

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

In recent years body-worn cameras have been championed by community groups, scholars, and the courts as a potential check on police misconduct. Such has been the enthusiasm for body-worn cameras that, in a relatively short time, they have been rolled out to police departments across the country. Perhaps because of the optimism surrounding these devices there has been little consideration of the Fourth Amendment issues they pose, especially when they are coupled with facial recognition technology (FRT). There is one particular context in which police use of FRT equipped body-worn cameras is especially concerning: public protests. This Comment constitutes the …

Fourth Amendment Constraints On The Technological Monitoring Of Convicted Sex Offenders, Ben A. Mcjunkin, J. J. Prescott

Articles

More than forty U.S. states currently track at least some of their convicted sex offenders using GPS devices. Many offenders will be monitored for life. The burdens and expense of living indefinitely under constant technological monitoring have been well documented, but most commentators have assumed that these burdens were of no constitutional moment because states have characterized such surveillance as ‘‘civil’’ in character—and courts have seemed to agree. In 2015, however, the Supreme Court decided in Grady v. North Carolina that attaching a GPS monitoring device to a person was a Fourth Amendment search, notwithstanding the ostensibly civil character of …

Privacy In The Cloud: The Fourth Amendment Fog, Sarah Aitchison

Washington Law Review

The Cloud has changed how individuals record, store, and aggregate their personal information. As technology’s capacity for holding an individual’s most intimate details and recording day-to-day experiences increases, Fourth Amendment privacy protections become less equipped to respond to technological advances. These advances allow private companies to store an immense amount of their consumers’ personal information, and government entities to obtain that information. In response, tech companies have begun refusing to comply with government demands for information collected and stored in their devices and in the Cloud, and are increasingly ending up in court, fighting orders to disclose consumer information. A …

Dangerous Warrants, Nirej Sekhon

Washington Law Review

The Supreme Court has cast judicial warrants as the Fourth Amendment gold standard for regulating police discretion. It has embraced a “warrant preference” on the premise that requiring police to obtain advance judicial approval for searches and seizures encourages accurate identification of evidence and suspects while minimizing interference with constitutional rights. The Court and commentators have overlooked the fact that most outstanding warrants do none of these things. Most outstanding warrants are what this article terms “non-compliance warrants”: summarily issued arrest warrants for failures to comply with a court or police order. State and local courts are profligate in issuing …

Fourth Amendment Fairness, Richard M. Re

Michigan Law Review

Fourth Amendment doctrine is attentive to a wide range of interests, including security, informational privacy, and dignity. How should courts reconcile these competing concerns when deciding which searches and seizures are “unreasonable”? Current doctrine typically answers this question by pointing to interest aggregation: the various interests at stake are added up, placed on figurative scales, and compared, with the goal of promoting overall social welfare. But interest aggregation is disconnected from many settled doctrinal rules and leads to results that are unfair for individuals. The main alternative is originalism; but historical sources themselves suggest that the Fourth Amendment calls for …

The Futile Fourth Amendment: Understanding Police Excessive Force Doctrine Through An Empirical Assessment Of Graham V. Connor, Osagie K. Obasogie, Zachary Newman

Northwestern University Law Review

Graham v. Connor established the modern constitutional landscape for police excessive force claims. The Supreme Court not only refined an objective reasonableness test to describe the constitutional standard, but also held that the Fourth Amendment is the sole avenue for courts to adjudicate claims that police violated a person’s constitutional rights in using force. In this Essay, we ask: What impact did this decision have on the nature of police excessive force claims in federal courts? To address this, we engaged in a qualitative examination of 500 federal cases (250 in the twenty-six years before Graham and 250 in the …