Fourth Amendment Commons^™

The Death Of Suspicion, Fabio Arcila Jr.

William & Mary Law Review

At the nation’s founding, search warrants and the concept of suspicion were well entrenched as a means of limiting governmental search power. This tradition largely explains why today’s Fourth Amendment law includes two foundational black letter rules: the presumptive warrant requirement and the presumptive suspicion requirement. Unfortunately, neither of these rules is correct. Certainly they have historical support, especially in the common law. But whether they reflect the totality of our historic experience is questionable, especially when civil search practices are considered. More importantly, modern developments—such as urban life and technological advancements, the rise of the regulatory state, and post-9/11 …

"You Crossed The Fog Line!"—Kansas, Pretext, And The Fourth Amendment, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

In Whren, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned pretextual traffic stops. In practice the holding of Whren condones police investigations that target certain suspect classes of people, like Hispanics, for increased police scrutiny. In permitting pretextual stops, the Court ignored the risk that such practices will encourage police to distort the truth, overlooked the cost of under-enforcement of the laws, and ignored the consequences to the criminal justice system of race and ethnicity based discrimination.

Kansas law exacerbates these risks by making fog-line stops a model for protecting ulterior motives from a sifting judicial inquiry. In Kansas, it makes …

Improbable Cause: A Case For Judging Police By A More Majestic Standard, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

Several prior studies have demonstrated that police sometimes, if not often, lie in an attempt to avoid the effects of the exclusionary rule. This study of federal trial judges in the District of Kansas suggests that judges may be fostering this police perjury. Judges may unwittingly encourage police perjury because they subconsciously recognize that acknowledging perjury will probably result in release of a culpable defendant. Judges may also permit perjury because they cannot determine when police are lying. In either case, the Supreme Court majority's conception of the exclusionary rule naturally leads trial judges to deny defendants' motions to suppress. …

A Fourth Amendment For The Poor Alone: Subconstitutional Status And The Myth Of The Inviolate Home, Jordan C. Budd

Law Faculty Scholarship

For much of our nation’s history, the poor have faced pervasive discrimination in the exercise of fundamental rights. Nowhere has the impairment been more severe than in the area of privacy. This Article considers the enduring legacy of this tradition with respect to the Fourth Amendment right to domestic privacy. Far from a matter of receding historical interest, the diminution of the poor’s right to privacy has accelerated in recent years and now represents a powerful theme within the jurisprudence of poverty. Triggering this development has been a series of challenges to aggressive administrative practices adopted by localities in the …

The Spot Program: Hello Racial Profiling, Goodbye Fourth Amendment?, Deborah L. Meyer

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Photo Enforcement Programs: Are They Permissible Under The United States Constitution?, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 463 (2010), Paul Mcnaughton

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Gps Monitoring May Cause Orwell To Turn In His Grave, But Will It Escape Constitutional Challenges? A Look At Gps Monitoring Of Domestic Violence Offenders In Illinois, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 845 (2010), Mary Ann Scholl

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Case For Stewart Over Harlan On 24/7 Physical Surveillance, Afsheen John Radsan

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explains why the government’s physical surveillance can reach a point in terms of duration and intensity that it becomes a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. As references, Katz v. United States and Kyllo v. United States stand out from the canon. Katz, decided in 1967, swept away a prior emphasis on property rights and trespass laws to hold that the electronic monitoring of a phone booth was a search. Since then, the two-part test from Justice Harlan’s concurring opinion has received as much attention as the totality-of-the-circumstances test in Justice Stewart’s majority opinion. Kyllo, decided just months before …

Public Interest(S) And Fourth Amendment Enforcement, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

Fourth Amendment events generate substantial controversy among the public and in the legal community. Yet there is orthodoxy to Fourth Amendment thinking, reflected in the near universal assumption by courts and commentators alike that the amendment creates only tension between privately held individual liberties and public-regarding interests in law enforcement and security. On this account, courts are faced with a clear choice when mediating Fourth Amendment conflicts: side with the individual by declaring a particular intrusion to be in violation of the Constitution or side with the public by permitting the intrusion. Scholarly literature and court decisions are accordingly littered …

Continuing Seizure And The Fourth Amendment: Conceptual Discord And Evidentiary Uncertainty In United States V. Dupree, Darby G. Sullivan

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

How Far Can The Automobile Exception Go? How Searches Of Computers And Similar Devices Push It To The Limit, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1119 (2010), Andrew Wrona

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Danger To Confidential Communications In The Mismatch Between The Fourth Amendment's "Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy" And The Confidentiality Of Evidentiary Privileges, Robert P. Mosteller, Kenneth S. Broun

Campbell Law Review

In May 2009, a bare majority of the Supreme Court of North Carolina decided State v. Rollins, making a serious mistake in privilege law that if applied generally will undermine the valued protections of evidentiary privileges. Ordinarily, few might criticize a ruling admitting statements like those made by the defendant, Mickey Rollins, who indicated his guilt for a homicide. However, Rollins' statements were made to his wife, and under established precedent, those conversations should have been ruled a privileged marital communication.

Veteran Police Officers And Three-Dollar Steaks: The Subjective/Objective Dimensions Of Probable Cause And Reasonable Suspicion, Kit Kinports

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses two issues surrounding probable cause and reasonable suspicion that test the line between subjective and objective standards in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence: the extent to which a particular police officer’s training and experience ought to be considered in measuring probable cause and reasonable suspicion, and the relevance of the officer’s subjective beliefs about the presence of a weapon in assessing the reasonable suspicion required to justify a frisk. Although both questions have split the lower courts and remain unresolved by the Supreme Court, the majority of courts treat them inconsistently, recognizing the importance of an officer’s training, experience, …

Bending Broken Rules: The Fourth Amendment Implications Of Full-Body Scanners In Preflight Screening, M. Madison Taylor

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

In the face of emerging technology, the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of protection against unreasonable searches and seizures is especially susceptible to erosion. As Justice Scalia wrote in Kyllo v. United States, “[i]t would be foolish to contend that the degree of privacy secured to citizens by the Fourth Amendment has been entirely unaffected by the advance of technology.” In Katz v. United States, technology compelled a dramatic shift in the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. Prior to Katz, the Court generally interpreted the Fourth Amendment to prevent only the search and seizure of tangible things, and looked to …

Mapp V. Ohio Revisited: A Law Clerk's Diary, Polly J. Price

Faculty Articles

The 1960 Supreme Court Term laid the groundwork for the subsequent revolution in the relationship between state and federal law accomplished by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. The "most famous search and seizure case in American history" - Mapp v. Ohio - would be decided that Term. Mapp held that the Fourth Amendment's protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures" required the exclusion of evidence found through an illegal search by state and local police officers, extending to the states a rule that had previously applied only to federal law enforcement. Mapp became a pivotal chapter in the …

Discipline In Schools After Safford Unified School District #1 V. Redding, Dennis D. Parker

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fourth Amendment Remedial Equilibration: A Comment On Herring V. United States And Pearson V. Callahan, David B. Owens

Articles

In two recent decisions, the Supreme Court addressed remedies under the Fourth Amendment by assuming that this remedial construction did not alter the value of the underlying right meant to be protected by the Constitution. First, in Herring v. United States, the court broadened exceptions to the exclusionary rule and implied that suppression may not be required for "negligent" errors generally. Then, in Pearson v. Callahan, the Court abandoned it's "battle-of-order" rule - which required courts to consider the right before inquiring whether that right was "clearly established" at the time of the violation - when considering qualified …

Mapp V. Ohio's Unsung Hero: The Suppression Hearing As Morality Play, Scott E. Sundby

Articles

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Litigation Under Section 1983 And The Bivens Doctrine In The October 2008 Term, Martin A. Schwartz

Touro Law Review

Section 1983 is the major enforcer of individual federal constitutional rights. It authorizes individuals to enforce their constitutional rights against state and local officials; for example,prison officers and police officers, and against municipalities. It is the most important civil statute in American law. To its credit, the United States Supreme Court understands the significance of § 1983.

For the past three decades, in virtually every single Term of theCourt, it has decided a substantial number of cases dealing with different facets of § 1983 litigation. Last Term, there was anunusual number of § 1983 decisions rendered by the United States …

Suspicion And The Protection Of Fourth Amendment Values, Fabio Arcila Jr.

Scholarly Works

Suspicion is perhaps the core foundational principle through which we seek to protect and vindicate Fourth Amendment values. Fourth Amendment law could not be clearer, and repeats over and over again, that it proceeds from a presumptive suspicion requirement. We are all so familiar with that proposition that we can easily incant it: a governmental search is presumptively unconstitutional unless supported by some threshold of prior suspicion. Though suspicion is thus a hallmark of Fourth Amendment black letter law, I come to critique it. I critique it because the presumptive suspicion requirement's provenance is historically questionable, both as a matter …