Imposing a Daily Burden on Thousands of Innocent Citizens: The Supreme Court Unnecessarily Limited Motorists\u27 Fourth Amendment Rights in Kansas v. Glover

This Article analyzes Kansas v. Glover, in which the Supreme Court ruled that an officer could stop a vehicle owned by a person having a revoked license on the assumption that the owner was currently driving the vehicle. This work examines the concerns created by Glover’s ruling. This Article asserts that, in creating its new rule enabling police to stop a motorist without first confirming his or her identity, the Court based its holding on the existence of two facts, thus effectively changing its traditional “totality of the circumstances” analysis for reasonable suspicion to a categorical rule. Further, Glover’s reasoning eroded Terry v. Ohio’s reasonable suspicion standard and discounted the motorist’s interests against seizures of the person, thus undermining Fourth Amendment rights. Finally, the Court, in adding a new element of “when the officer lacks information negating an inference” to Terry’s analysis, shifted the burden of proof for assessing the lawfulness of the seizure to the motorist. Glover therefore potentially imposes a daily burden on “thousands of innocent citizens” who happen to be borrowing a car

Lateral diffusive spin transport in layered structures

A one dimensional theory of lateral spin-polarized transport is derived from the two dimensional flow in the vertical cross section of a stack of ferromagnetic and paramagnetic layers. This takes into account the influence of the lead on the lateral current underneath, in contrast to the conventional 1D modeling by the collinear configuration of lead/channel/lead. Our theory is convenient and appropriate for the current in plane configuration of an all-metallic spintronics structure as well as for the planar structure of a semiconductor with ferromagnetic contacts. For both systems we predict the optimal contact width for maximal magnetoresistance and propose an electrical measurement of the spin diffusion length for a wide range of materials.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Trading Privacy for Promotion? Fourth Amendment Implications of Employers Using Wearable Sensors to Assess Worker Performance

This Article considers the Fourth Amendment implications of a study on a passive monitoring system where employees shared data from wearables, phone applications, and position beacons that provided private information such as weekend phone use, sleep patterns in the bedroom, and emotional states. The study’s authors hope to use the data collected to create a new system for objectively assessing employee performance that will replace the current system which is plagued by the inherent bias of self-reporting and peer-review and which is labor intensive and inefficient. The researchers were able to successfully link the data collected with the quality of worker performance. This technological advance raises the prospect of law enforcement gaining access to sensitive information from employers for use in criminal investigations. This Article analyzes the Fourth Amendment issues raised by police access to this new technology. Although the Supreme Court currently finds government collection of a comprehensive chronicle of a person’s life to constitute a Fourth Amendment search, widespread employee acceptance of mobile sensing could undermine any claim in having a reasonable expectation of privacy in such information. Additionally, employee tolerance of passive monitoring could make employer data available to the government through third party consent. When previously assessing employees’ privacy, the Court demonstrated a willingness to accept the needs of the employer and society as justification for limiting workers’ Fourth Amendment rights. Ultimately, then, Court precedent suggests that passive monitoring could erode Fourth Amendment rights in the long term

The Loss of Privacy Is Just a Heartbeat Away: An Exploration of Government Heartbeat Detection Technology and Its Impact on Fourth Amendment Protections

The Department of Energy has developed the Enclosed Space Detection System (ESDS), a search tool that enables officials to identify persons hidden inside vehicles at certain sensitive sites, such as nuclear facilities. ESDS operates by measuring the movements in vehicles generated by the beating of an occupant\u27s heart. This Article considers the Fourth Amendment privacy implications caused by the advent of a technology so advanced that it can probe all the way to one\u27s heart. Specifically, this Article critically examines the Supreme Court\u27s Fourth Amendment precedent concerning the definition of a search and the application of the special needs doctrine to assess the impact of the heartbeat detector on privacy