ISSN: 0193-4872 Academic Search Complete: January 1990 - Present
Articles of Interest
The Fourth Amendment in the Age of Autonomous Vehicles by Pearl, Tracy HreskoAutonomous vehicles exist at the intersection of two extremely turbulent areas of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence--traffic stops and emerging technologies--and have implications for virtually every major search and seizure doctrine developed over the last century. Complicating matters even further is the fact that car manufacturers are developing these vehicles at varying rates, meaning that vehicles with differing levels of automation are being introduced onto the consumer market at different (and often unpredictable) times. Each level of vehicle automation, in turn, poses unique issues for law enforcement. Semi-autonomous (Levels 2 and 3) vehicles make it extremely difficult for police to distinguish between dangerous distracted driving and safe use of a vehicle's autonomous capabilities. Fully autonomous (Levels 4 and 5) vehicles solve this problem but create another one: they give criminals the ability to use these vehicles to break the law with an extremely low risk of detection. How and whether we solve these legal and law enforcement issues depends on our willingness to adapt or abandon a number of significant Fourth Amendment doctrines. Six possible solutions (in order from least to most extreme) reveal why. These solutions include (1) restrictions on visibility obstructions; (2) restrictions on the use and purchase of fully autonomous vehicles; (3) requirements that users of these cars provide advance consent for suspicionless traffic stops and searches; (4) creation of government checkpoints or pulloffs requiring autonomous vehicles to submit to brief stops and dog sniffs; (5) exploitation of the third-party doctrine to surveil the data generated by these vehicles; and (6) abandonment of the century-old "automobile exception" in favor of rebalancing Fourth Amendment jurisprudence for the benefit of motorists who, for far too long, have seen a gradual but persistent erosion of some of their most significant constitutional rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Publication Date: Fall 2022. George Mason Law Review. v.30, no. 1. p.179-225
Publication Date: 2010. Kansas Law Review. v.58, no.3.
https://doi.org/10.17161/1808.20122
Special matters: Filtering privileged materials in federal prosecutions by Frohock, Christina MThis Article reviews the U.S. Department of Justice's toolbox for handling potentially privileged materials, with close attention to the evolution .from .Alter teams to the Special Matters Unit in fraud prosecutions. Significant case opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals .for the Fourth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits reveal the judiciary's diverse views on filter teams. The recent case of United States v. Esformes in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, now on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, illustrates how a filter team can fall short and draw unflattering attention to the Department of Justice. In the wake of Esformes and other .filter team criticisms, the Department introduced the Special Matters Unit to usher in a new, improved, and centralized team. Underlying all these privilege strategies is a view of criminal justice as quasi-adversarial. The special role for prosecutors to seek justice rather than convictions implies that a criminal prosecution is not purely competitive. This quasi-adversarial view is the invisible side to privilege, justifying and animating the Department of Justice's privilege strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Publication Date: Fall 2021. American Journal of Criminal Law. v.49, no.1. p.63-93.