A letter from a reader, reprinted with permission, but redacted to remove identifiers:
I had an appeal in [my state], [citation omitted], concerning whether a seizure or a consensual encounter had occurred, and the law in [my state] on the subject was, well, not good. I found the XXXX decision on your site, and used it to cite several out of state decisions in support.
Surprisingly, we won, and the court even cited all of the out of state decisions. I may not have seen the decision without your blog, and your work has been essential in shifting the law in [my state]. The case is now cited both federally and around the state, and we are all thankful.
I look at your site on a daily basis, and keep up the good work.
In some areas of Fourth Amendment or state search and seizure law, you can find opposing cases on the same subject between states and sometimes in the same state. As a quote in the sidebar says:
“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).
It still doesn’t. After studying the Fourth Amendment in earnest for the last 35 years, yet still practicing law, I see cases several times a week that I find unfathomable, motivated by result oriented jurisprudence or just by a judge’s hatred for the right to privacy being granted to an accused criminal, thinking that the police should have near free rein over the citizenry.
I started spending the time on this blog, an average of 90 minutes a day, despite my day job, to educate lawyers and judges about this exceedingly arcane and complicated area of the law. I see pointless motions to suppress, but, hey, sometimes we have to file them. I also see overtly duplicitous decisions from courts involving creation of legal fictions, and, when I really disagree, I say so. Sometimes I just bite my tongue.
The website early became searchable. Not as good as Lexis or Westlaw, but something. I added a list of SCOTUS cases with citations over a year ago so lawyers could more readily find cases helping their cause, and over 250 SCOTUS cases cite the Fourth Amendment.
The original plan was to help me work on the Fourth Edition of Search and Seizure. For all the time I’ve spent here, I could have rewritten it four times. This blog is a job unto itself.
I average 50,000 visits a month. Letters like this prove that people actually benefit, and the law gets better, more uniform, somewhat. That makes it all worthwhile.
