GPS

By Micah W.J. Smith, an associate at O’Melveny and Myers, and Babak Siavoshy, a teaching fellow at UC Berkeley’s Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. Siavoshy was part of the legal team that represented Antoine Jones while an associate at O’Melveny and Myers, and has not worked on the case in his capacity at UC Berkeley. 

In June of last year, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski and one of his law clerks wrote a eulogy for the Fourth Amendment, in which they mournfully concluded that “[w]ith so little left private, the Fourth Amendment is all but obsolete.” With the benefit of hindsight, it seems the eulogy may have been premature. On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in United States v. Jones, and unanimously held that the government violated Antoine Jones’s Fourth Amendment rights by surreptitiously monitoring his vehicle’s movements on public roads for four weeks. The Court’s decision is a ringing endorsement of the Fourth Amendment as a bulwark of liberty — and of the Amendment’s relevance to the surveillance technologies of the twenty-first century.

As members of Antoine Jones’s legal team in the Supreme Court, we thought we’d offer a few thoughts on the case and its implications. Given the significant amount of commentary that is already available on the blogosphere, we won’t dwell too much on the details. (For readers interested in a more granular analysis, we recommend Tom Goldstein’s post at SCOTUSblog. Or Orin Kerr’s several posts at The Volokh Conspiracy. For readers interested in a broader overview, try Adam Liptak’s article in The New York Times.)

Prior to Jones, there were good reasons to believe the Fourth Amendment was dying. Since the Court decided Katz v. United States over forty years ago, the Amendment’s protections were commonly understood to apply only when the government intruded on a person’s subjective expectation of privacy that society would deem reasonable. The Court had never explicitly overruled earlier cases that pinned the Fourth Amendment to founding-era property concepts, but any commentator familiar with LaFave’s authoritative treatises would have been tempted to conclude that those cases had lost their vitality, or were, in legal jargon, no longer “good law.”

The problem was that at the same time it took on Fourth Amendment primacy, privacy was losing some of its power. This was in part because new and fast-changing technologies — think smart phones, sophisticated data mining techniques, and Google — were at once making our lives more and more convenient and less and less private. It was also perhaps because a new generation of Americans has come of age with Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, and many of us now have a much more complicated relationship with privacy. It’s a relationship that takes for granted that privacy might flourish even in public places, and even in information that has been shared with some people but not everyone. And it’s a relationship the law has been too quick to paint as a lack of any privacy at all.