Parents could not be ordered to undergo UAs as a condition of a juvenile’s delinquency proceeding without specific evidence of wrongdoing. State v. Moreno, 2009 UT 15, 624 Utah Adv. Rep. 14, 203 P.3d 1000 (2009), rehearing denied 2009 Utah LEXIS 117 (Utah, Feb. 20, 2009):
[*P16] The second component of a test of a condition’s reasonableness is whether there is a logical connection between the parent’s conduct, the minor’s conduct, and the court order. If the court order is premised on a belief that there may be drug use in the home, then there must be, at minimum, sufficient evidence to suggest that drug use is in fact occurring in the home. Finally, if the goal of the order is to reform the minor’s drug use, the order must be related to drug use rather than to another aspect of the parent’s behavior unrelated to drugs. By requiring that to be reasonable the conditions imposed by the court order bear some relationship to the behavior of both the minor and the adult, the test we announce today ensures that court-ordered restrictions and expectations conform to generally accepted parenting norms. A court order requiring a parent to complete drug testing that has no connection with the circumstances of the case would not be reasonable.
[*P17] An example of the connection required can be found in child welfare cases. In those cases, before a parent’s parental rights may be terminated, sufficient record facts must be presented to satisfy the statutory elements for termination, including that termination of parental rights is in the best interest of the minor. M.G. v. M.S.H. (In re T.H.), 2007 UT App 341, P 11, 171 P.3d 480. In M.T.M. v. State (State ex rel. T.M.), the court determined that a father’s parental rights were correctly terminated because there was a connection between the court order terminating his rights and facts material to his relationship with the child, such as his past incidents of domestic violence that occurred in front of the children, his use of methamphetamine in the presence of the children that caused the children to test positive for methamphetamine residue, his failure to stay in drug treatment, and his refusal to stop leaving the children in the care of their mother, who was a habitual methamphetamine user. 2006 UT App 435, P 18, 147 P.3d 529. An analogous standard can be applied in child delinquency cases. The greater the nexus between the order and reformatory goal, the more likely an order and the conditions it imposes will be reasonable.
[*P18] While a connection between the facts of the case, the court order, and the rehabilitative goal is necessary for an order imposing conditions on the parent to be reasonable, this does not mean that court orders directed at parents require probable cause to believe that the parent is engaging in undesirable behavior in order to be reasonable. Nor does it require that there be probable cause to believe that the parent’s alleged behavior caused the delinquent behavior of the child for the order to be reasonable. Rather, where the condition imposed by the juvenile court does not impair the parent’s constitutional rights, an order will be reasonable if it is based on a more than wholly speculative belief that the parent is engaging in behavior that is likely contributing materially to the minor’s delinquent behavior.
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"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced." —Williams v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold, J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today." — Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property." —Entick v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth Amendment." —United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth." —Chapman v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable." —Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected." —Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” —United States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.” —United States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need." —Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Let it Bleed (album, 1969)
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration camp]
“Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom.” – John le Carré, The Night Manager (1993), line by Richard Roper
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime." —Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
