SCOTUSBlog: The Court after Scalia: Scalia’s absence may help preserve the exclusionary rule

SCOTUSBlog: The Court after Scalia: Scalia’s absence may help preserve the exclusionary rule by Orin Kerr:

Justice Antonin Scalia was a strong opponent of the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule. When the Court heard a case about its scope, Scalia’s vote was easy to predict. Scalia took the government’s side every time. His votes made him part of a conservative majority that consistently chipped away at the exclusionary rule over Scalia’s thirty years on the Court. Scalia’s death, and the possibility that he will be replaced by a very different Justice, raises the possibility that further chipping away may now stall – and may, over time, be reversed.

Scalia’s opposition to the exclusionary rule is easy to forget today because he developed a reputation near the end of his career as a friend of criminal defendants. That reputation was only partially deserved. For most of his career, Scalia was among the Court’s most government-friendly votes in criminal cases. But during his last decade on the Court, Justice Scalia became something of a “swing vote” in several Fourth Amendment cases.