A letter from a reader, reprinted with permission, but redacted to remove identifiers:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I look at your site on a daily basis, and keep up the good work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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:<\/p>\n
“The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated here, has not\u2013-to put it mildly\u2013-run smooth.”
\n\u2014Chapman v. United States<\/a>, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring). <\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt 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. <\/p>\n
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<\/em> disagree, I say so. Sometimes I just bite my tongue.<\/p>\n
The website early became searchable. Not as good as Lexis or Westlaw, but something. I added a list of SCOTUS cases<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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