Volokh: “Does Fourth Amendment Standing Work Differently for Jones Trespass Searches, Traditional Katz Searches, and Long-term Katz Searches?”

Volokh.com: Does Fourth Amendment Standing Work Differently for Jones Trespass Searches, Traditional Katz Searches, and Long-term Katz Searches? by Orin Kerr:

Over the last forty years, the Supreme Court has worked out a series of principles for when a defendant has standing to object to the Fourth Amendment search of someone else’s property. According to the those cases, the key issue is whether the government violated the defendant’s own reasonable expectation of privacy under the framework introduced by Justice Harlan’s concurring opinion in Katz v. United States. The owner, legitimate renter, or legitimate repeated borrower of a car generally has standing to object to a search of it. A person who steals a car or drives it in violation of a rental contract does not.

In the recent GPS decision of United States v. Jones, however, the Supreme Court introduced — or, depending on how you look at it, reintroduced — two new kinds of Fourth Amendment searches. First, the majority opinion introduced a trespass test for what is a search that supplements the Katz expectation-of-privacy test. Second, to the extent you think it proper to combine the votes of the concurring opinions and consider that an alternative holding, five Justices thought that the cumulative effect of 30 days of monitoring of the car also amounted to a search of the car because it revealed such invasive information about its public location over time.

So here’s the question: Does the standing inquiry developed over the last forty years for Katz expectation–of-privacy searches apply in the same way for Jones trespass searches and Jones long-term expectation of privacy searches? Or is the standing test different?

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.