WaPo: In Fourth Amendment cases, it’s a toss-up by Orin Kerr:

A lot of people think that today’s Supreme Court is conservative and pro-government in Fourth Amendment cases. It can be hard to analyze those views because they often hinge on disputed questions of framing: What is the baseline for determining what the Fourth Amendment should be interpreted to mean, in order to say whether the Court tends to be “pro government” or “pro defense”? With that said, one very blunt measure is to count wins in argued cases. The Supreme Court usually grants cert and hears argument in cases only when there was a division in the lower courts about how the law applies. The Court then hears the case and picks a side, effectively moving the law in one direction or the other. Given that, we can get a very rough cut answer to the question by counting wins in recent argued Fourth Amendment cases.

WaPo: Explaining Heien and Rodriguez by Orin Kerr:

Over at Slate, Mark Joseph Stern has an article trying to explain the Justices’ votes in Rodriguez v. United States, yesterday’s Fourth Amendment case on the length of traffic stops. Stern focuses his attention on Chief Justice Roberts, who ruled for the defense in Rodriguez but for the government in December’s Heien v. North Carolina on reasonable mistakes of law. Stern has a theory for why the Chief Justice could have voted for the defense in one case and the government in the other.

In a single sentence, Stern notes that it’s possible that the Chief Justice simply thought the two cases presented different legal issues. But then Stern settles into his real theory: Something happened to Chief Justice Roberts between Heien in December and Rodriguez in April that fundamentally changed his view of the police. Roberts must have had an “epiphany.” And we need to figure out what caused the epiphany. Here’s Stern:

It could be that in the last few months, Roberts got pulled over—apparently for the first time in his life—and finally grasps how fraught such encounters often are.