What is the Essential Fourth Amendment?

22 Pages Posted: 14 Feb 2013

Date Written: February 14, 2013

Abstract

In More Essential Than Ever: The Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century, Stephen Schulhofer provides a strong, popularized brief for interpreting the Fourth Amendment as a command that judicial review precede all non-exigent police investigative actions that are more than minimally intrusive. This review points out a few places where Schulhofer may push the envelope too far or not far enough, but concludes that More Essential Than Ever is a welcome reminder for scholars and the public at large that the Fourth Amendment is a fundamental bulwark of constitutional jurisprudence and deserves more respect than the Supreme Court has given it. Appended to the review of Schulhofer's book is a review of another book, Simon Chesterman's One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty. Chesterman argues that traditional civil libertarian efforts to limit camera surveillance, data mining, biometric identification and other types of intelligence gathering are doomed and that governments should instead concentrate on regulating the use of the intelligence it collects, pursuant to publicly debated laws that provide a transparent framework for making decisions about how and when to disseminate the information obtained. After describing the gist of the book, this review, to be published in Intelligence and National Security, investigates these prescriptions in more detail and, with a few caveats, subscribes to them.

Keywords: Fourth Amendment, search and seizure, data mining, camera surveillance

Suggested Citation

Slobogin, Christopher, What is the Essential Fourth Amendment? (February 14, 2013). Texas Law Review, Vol. 91, No. 2, 2012, Vanderbilt Public Law Research Paper No. 13-5, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2217687

Christopher Slobogin (Contact Author)

Vanderbilt University - Law School ( email )

131 21st Avenue South
Nashville, TN 37203-1181
United States

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