Rodriguez is a Fourth Amendment case involving a search and seizure after the predicate traffic stop had ended.  In this case, the police stopped a vehicle, and the officer wrote the driver a warning for momentarily veering onto the shoulder.  However, even though the stop had ended, the officer continued to talk to the occupants and asked them if they minded him searching the vehicle with his drug dog.  When the driver declined, the cop seized the car and occupants, ordering them not to move.  He then performed a dog-sniff drug search. Read More

Heien is a Fourth Amendment case involving a traffic stop for something that the officer incorrectly believed was a crime.  Although the car should not have been stopped, the North Carolina courts upheld the police’s seizure of the car’s passenger’s illegal property because the police’s mistake in stopping the car was “reasonable.”  Heien sought U.S. Supreme Court review, and CLDEF submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of his position.  CLDEF’s brief critiqued the use of the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test that has been routinely used by federal courts to justify intrusions of liberty through a multitude of subjective shades of grey.  Instead, armed with an understanding that the Fourth Amendment protects property rights, the inquiry becomes objectively black and white — whether the government does or does not have a superior property interest in the person and/or vehicle it wishes to detain.  Viewed in that light, the police had no right to stop someone who had violated no law, regardless of how “reasonable” an officer’s mistake may seem to a court. Read More

Wurie was a Fourth Amendment case involving the warrantless search of a cellular phone pursuant to an arrest.  The government argued that, any time it makes an arrest, it has the right to search a person’s cell phone without a warrant as a matter of course, “incidental” to the arrest.  Wurie was convicted based upon information found in the search, and he sought U.S. Supreme Court review. Read More

Cotterman was a Fourth Amendment case about whether the federal government can seize a laptop at a border checkpoint and copy the contents without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion.  Cotterman was convicted based on such a search, and he sought review by the U.S. Supreme Court.  CLDEF’s amicus curiae brief, in support of the petitioner, argued that the case should not be analyzed based on non-textual “reasonable expectation of privacy” standards, but instead involved a “general search” absolutely prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.  This would be no different than if the government seized a person’s firearms and copied down the serial numbers as part of a general search to see if they were stolen.  CLDEF’s effort in this case continues to press for a revitalized Fourth Amendment principle to protect property, not just some watered-down notion of a reasonable expectation of privacy — an expectation which is rapidly shrinking in the digital age. Read More

This case involved a challenge, by attorneys sometimes representing foreign persons, to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Amendments of 2008, involving the government spying on U.S. citizens without a warrant.  The lower court dismissed the case, finding the plaintiffs lacked standing, but the Second Circuit reversed.  The Government sought U.S. Supreme Court review. Read More

This case constitutes a major victory for CLDEF!  Jones involved the police attaching a GPS tracking device to Jones’ vehicle without a warrant.  The police tracked Jones’ movements for nearly a month.  Jones was convicted, but the Court of Appeals overturned the conviction.  The government sought U.S. Supreme Court review.  The government argued that Jones had no expectation of privacy of his movements on the road. Read More

On May 16, 2011 an amicus brief was filed on behalf of CLDEF in the case of United States v. Antoine Jones in the United States Supreme Court. Our amicus brief urges the Supreme Court to grant the petition for writ of certiorari in this case, not for the reasons stated in the government’s petition, but to resolve a split among the circuits on the Fourth Amendment’s relevance and application to covert installations of global positioning systems (“GPS”) on an American citizen’s automobile by restoring the Fourth Amendment to its original text and purpose. Our amicus brief argues that the original objective, property-based text and purpose of the Fourth Amendment should be revived and applied, while the current ad hoc subjective, privacy-based view of the Fourth Amendment should be rejected.