WaPo: Oral argument in Heien v. North Carolina

WaPo: Oral argument in Heien v. North Carolina by Orin Kerr:

I attended the oral argument this morning in the Supreme Court’s first case of the new Term, Heien v. North Carolina. I had a long preview of Heien here. Here are some impressions of the argument.

On the whole, I thought the argument was puzzling. A large chunk of the argument time was spent on Justice Scalia’s insistence that the Court could not render a decision on the rights question alone without also ruling on whether the exclusionary rule was available. I found this odd for two reasons. First, the state had never argued the exclusionary rule. The state’s Brief in Opposition had argued that it would be better to review a different case in which the exclusionary rule issue was also part of the case, a position the Justices presumably weighed before granting cert on just the rights question.