Fourth Amendment Commons^™

Notice And Standing In The Fourth Amendment: Searches Of Personal Data, Jennifer Daskal

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In at least two recent cases, courts have rejected service providers' capacity to raise Fourth Amendment claims on behalf of their customers. These holdings rely on longstanding Supreme Court doctrine establishing a general rule against third parties asserting the Fourth Amendment rights of others. However, there is a key difference between these two recent cases and those cases on which the doctrine rests. The relevant Supreme Court doctrine stems from situations in which someone could take action to raise the Fourth Amendment claim, even if the particular thirdparty litigant could not. In the situations presented by the recent cases, by …

Policing Predictive Policing, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Predictive policing is sweeping the nation, promising the holy grail of policing – preventing crime before it happens. Police have embraced predictive analytics and data-driven metrics to improve law enforcement tactics, practice, and strategy. Predictive “hot spots” become targets for intensive police surveillance. Targeted “hot people” become suspects. In big cities and small towns, data-based predictions drive police patrol schedules. Risk assessment algorithms target suspicious individuals. Increased data collection fuels a growing feedback loop requiring more robust data crunching systems.All of these predictive innovations share one thing in common: a belief that crime can be understood by identifying and analyzing …

The Fourth Amendment In A Digital World, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Fourth Amendment doctrines created in the 1970s and 1980s no longer reflect how the world works. The formal legal distinctions on which they rely—(a) private versus public space, (b) personal information versus third party data, (c) content versus non-content, and (d) domestic versus international—are failing to protect the privacy interests at stake. Simultaneously, reduced resource constraints are accelerating the loss of rights. The doctrine has yet to catch up with the world in which we live. A necessary first step for the Court is to reconsider the theoretical underpinning of the Fourth Amendment, to allow for the evolution of a …

The Fourth Amendment And Driving While Intoxicated: When Does A Police Officer Need A Warrant ?, Marra Kassman

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ithink My Electronic Data Is Secure, But Is It: A Constitutional Analysis Of In Re The Search Of An Apple Iphone, Shira Bloom

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mass Suppression: Aggregation And The Fourth Amendment, Nirej Sekhon

Georgia Law Review

The FourthAmendment's exclusionary rule requires that
criminal courts suppress evidence obtained as a result of
an unconstitutionalsearch or seizure. The Supreme Court
has repeatedly stated that suppression is purely
regulatory, not remedial. Its only purpose is to deter
future police misconduct, not to remedy past privacy or
liberty harms suffered by the defendant. Exclusion, in
other words, is for the benefit of community members who
might, sometime in the future, be subject to police
misconduct like that endured by the defendant.
Exclusion's regulatory purpose would be greatly aided if
criminal courts could identify when a suppression motion
involved Fourth Amendment …

Simon Didn't Say: When Reconstruction Of A Private Search Goes Awry Under The Private Search Doctrine, John G. Chambers

Georgia Law Review

A privateparty conducting an unreasonablesearch of an
individual need not fear the Fourth Amendment as the
proscriptions therein are applicable against only the
government. The government, however, need not fear the
Fourth Amendment where it replicates that private party's
unreasonable search. As such, the Fourth Amendment is
not offended where the government directs the private

party to "reconstruct" its initial search. This
reconstruction doctrine breeds many questions in
application, particularly in the digital context. In
grappling with these questions, this Note demonstrates
that the current law provides no satisfying answers. It
proposes a new test to assess reconstructed private party …

Reaching Across The Threshold Of The Fourth Amendment - Why Payton V. New York Should Be Interpreted Broadly, Caroline Hunt

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

The 'Smart' Fourth Amendment, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

“Smart” devices radiate data, detailing a continuous, intimate, and revealing pattern of daily life. Billions of sensors will soon collect data from smartphones, smart homes, smart cars, medical devices and an evolving assortment of consumer and commercial products. But, what are these data trails to the Fourth Amendment? Does data emanating from devices on or about our bodies, houses, things, and digital effects fall within the Fourth Amendment’s protection of “persons, homes, papers, or effects”? Does interception of this information violate a “reasonable expectation of privacy?”The “Internet of Things” and the growing proliferation of smart devices create new opportunities for …

Carpenter V. United States: Brief Of Scholars Of Criminal Procedure And Privacy As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Amici curiae are forty-two scholars engaged in significant research and/or teaching on criminal procedure and privacy law. This brief addresses issues that are within amici’s particular areas of scholarly expertise. They have a shared interest in clarifying the law of privacy in the digital era, and believe that a review of scholarly literature on the topic is helpful to answering the question in this case. This brief is co-authored by Harry Sandick, Kathrina Szymborski, & Jared Buszin of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP.Carpenter v. United States presents an opportunity to reconsider the Fourth Amendment in the digital age. Cell …

Our Criminal Laws, Our Constitution, Sarah Seo

Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews three recently published books that further explore this insight in the twentieth century. At first glance, vagrancy laws, the free will problem, and criminal records may seem to share little in common. But each study illuminates how criminal laws have defined our nation by creating what historian Barbara Welke has termed "borders of belonging," a boundary that laws create between people who enjoy full citizenship and those who do not. After all, a conviction and imprisonment are acts of social and political exclusion. Even the policing of suspected offenders often reveals who does not completely belong.

The …

Knowledge And Fourth Amendment Privacy, Matthew Tokson

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article examines the central role that knowledge plays in determining the Fourth Amendment’s scope. What people know about surveillance practices or new technologies often shapes the “reasonable expectations of privacy” that define the Fourth Amendment’s boundaries. From early decisions dealing with automobile searches to recent cases involving advanced information technologies, courts have relied on assessments of knowledge in a wide variety of Fourth Amendment contexts. Yet the analysis of knowledge in Fourth Amendment law is rarely if ever studied on its own.

This Article fills that gap. It starts by identifying the characteristics of Fourth Amendment knowledge. It finds, …

Warrantless Inspections By Administrative Officials Held Violative Of Fourth Amendment

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Cellphones And The Fourth Amendment: Why Cellphone Users Have A Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy In Their Location Information, Paul Cividanes

Journal of Law and Policy

The Fourth Amendment, which affords individuals protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, was ratified over two hundred years ago. As such, it was impossible for the Amendment’s framers to conceive the technologies that exist today. As technology progresses, courts are often faced with the task of deciding how the Fourth Amendment should apply in the modern world. As Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has developed, the Supreme Court has originated tests and doctrines for courts to use when hearing Fourth Amendment challenges to government action. One such test, the ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ test, looks to see whether an individual has a …

Policing Criminal Justice Data, Wayne A. Logan, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Update On School Searches, Charles J. Russo

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

School safety continues to present significant challenges for education leaders. Yet as educators work to maintain school safety, boards face a steady stream of litigation because officials have searched students suspected of putting themselves or others in danger. For example, students have been searched because they were suspected of bringing into schools such prohibited items as alcohol, weapons, and drugs.

Education leaders must develop up-to-date policies that ensure safety but that also comply with the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

Why Arrest?, Rachel A. Harmon

Michigan Law Review

Arrests are the paradigmatic police activity. Though the practice of arrests in the United States, especially arrests involving minority suspects, is under attack, even critics widely assume the power to arrest is essential to policing. As a result, neither commentators nor scholars have asked why police need to make arrests. This Article takes up that question, and it argues that the power to arrest and the use of that power should be curtailed. The twelve million arrests police conduct each year are harmful not only to the individual arrested but also to their families and communities and to society as …

Policing As Administration, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Police agencies should be governed by the same administrative principles that govern other agencies. This simple precept would have significant implications for regulation of police work, in particular the type of suspicionless, group searches and seizures that have been the subject of the Supreme Court's special needs jurisprudence (practices that this Article calls "panvasive"). Under administrative law principles, when police agencies create statute-like policies that are aimed at largely innocent categories of actors-as they do when administering roadblocks, inspection regimes, drug testing programs, DNA sampling programs, and data collection-they should have to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking or a similar democratically …

"Reasonable" Police Mistakes: Fourth Amendment Claims And The "Good Faith" Exception After Heien, Karen Mcdonald Henning

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Given Heien’s distinction between the standard under the Fourth Amendment and the standard for qualified immunity, we are left after Heien with the conclusion that the concept of “objectively reasonable” conduct varies depending on the type of claim the Court is addressing. In particular, Heien leaves open both the question of what constitutes a reasonable mistake of law for Fourth Amendment purposes and the question of how that answer relates to the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule. This Article explores these questions. Part I examines how the Court has increased its tolerance of police mistakes, both in …

Cops On Trial: Did Fourth Amendment Case Law Help George Zimmerman’S Claim Of Self-Defense?, Josephine Ross

Seattle University Law Review

When police kill unarmed civilians, prosecutors and grand juries often decline to bring criminal charges. Even when police officers are indicted, they are seldom convicted at trial. There are many reasons why police are rarely convicted for violent acts. Commentators have criticized the inherent conflict of interest for prosecutors who decide whether to bring charges and the fact that police are investigating their own. However, this article considers another way that police may be treated differently than other people suspected of committing violent crimes. The Fourth Amendment, designed to protect civilians from overzealous officers, now helps insulate police suspected of …