Reworking the Warrant Requirement: Resuscitating the Fourth Amendment

Ninety-three years ago, in response to a newspaper account, Mark Twain wrote: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. While it may be premature to sound the death knell for the fourth amendment, it is no exaggeration to suggest that unless drastic action is taken to remedy the destructive erosion of the fourth amendment, it may as well be buried. Current search and seizure doctrine is inconsistent and incoherent.\u27 No one, including the police who are to abide by it, judges who apply it, or the people who are protected by it, has any meaningful sense of what the law is. Undaunted by the lack of coherent guidelines, the police are searching houses, greenhouses, warehouses, motor vehicles, papers, and effects, and seizing persons and things. Meanwhile, judges are required to determine the constitutionality of these searches. Two decades of jurisprudence covering the warrant requirement and probable cause have seen a ruling majority of the United States Supreme Court either refusing to follow precedent or rewriting precedent to suit present concerns. Rather than mold a body of reliable fourth amendment law, the Supreme Court has created a makeshift solution. Instead of providing direction and guidance to lower courts, the Court has rendered amorphous case-by-case, fact-specific adjudications, whose method of reasoning often is better suited for juries in negligence actions than judges adjudicating constitutional rights. This lack of clear rules has left search and seizure law mired in confusion and contradiction. Some scholars suggest that the fourth amendment is a diseased limb on a sick tree and that the morass of the fourth amendment is symbolic of larger problems with constitutional theory generally. \u27 While the analogy is apt, the fourth amendment branch can be treated, pruned, and cured apart from the ailments of the rest of the constitutional tree

Behind Open Doors: Constitutional Implications of Government Employee Drug Testing

By the summer of 1986 as many as 25% of America\u27s largest companies instituted some form of employee screening for drug use

Food quality, competition, and parasitism influence feeding preference in a neotropical lepidopteran

Journal ArticleWe surveyed Lepidoptera found on 11 species of Inga (Fabaceae:Mimosoideae) co-existing on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, to evaluate factors influencing diet choice. Of the 47 species of caterpillars (747 individuals) recorded, each fed on a distinct set of Inga. In the field, 96% of the individuals were found on young leaves. Growth rates of caterpillars that were fed leaves in the laboratory were 60% higher on young leaves compared to mature leaves

Red coloration of tropical young leaves: a possible antifungal defense?

Journal ArticleMany woody species in humid tropical forests synchronously flush entire canopies of young red leaves. Numerous unsuccessful attempts have been made to explain the adaptive value of this visually striking phenomenon. In the humid tropics, fungal attack is a potentially important source of mortality for expanding young leaves. We propose that the anthocyanins responsible for the red coloration of young leaves may play a protective role against invasions by leaf-attacking fungal pathogens

Submarine landslides on the upper southeast Australian passive continental margin – preliminary findings

The southeast Australian passive continental margin is narrow, steep and sediment-deficient, and characterized by relatively low rates of modern sedimentation. Upper slope (\u3c1200m) sediments comprise mixtures of calcareous and terrigenous sand and mud. Three of twelve sediment cores recovered from geologically-recent, submarine landslides located offshore New South Wales/Queensland (NSW/QLD) are interpreted to have sampled failure surfaces at depths of between 85 cm and 220 cm below the present-day seabed. Differences in sediment physical properties are recorded above and below the three slide-plane boundaries. Sediment taken directly above the inferred submarine landslide failure surfaces and presumed to be post-landslide, returned radiocarbon ages of 15.8 ka, 20.7 ka and 20.1 ka. The last two ages correspond to adjacent slide features, which are inferred to be consistent with their being triggered by a single event such as an earthquake. Slope stability models based on classical soil mechanics and measured sediment shearstrengths indicate that the upper slope sediments should be stable. However, multibeam sonar data reveal that many upper slope landslides occur across the margin and that submarine landsliding is a common process. We infer from these results that: a) an unidentified mechanism regularly acts to reduce the shear resistance of these sediments to the very low values required to enable slope failure, and/or b) the margin experiences seismic events that act to destabilise the slope sediments

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND HOUSEHOLD INCOME DISTRIBUTIONS: EVIDENCE FROM MICHIGAN AND ILLINOIS

Social capital is a resource increasingly recognized as having important economic and social consequences. Robison and Siles (1999) examined some of these consequences at the U.S. state level and this study extends their efforts. Their 1999 study found important connections between the distributions of social capital and the distributions of household incomes. This study asks if the relationships between social capital and household incomes discovered at the state level are also present at the community level.Consumer/Household Economics, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,