(x-posted from Coffee House Talks)
In doing the initial framing for an article on how to apply Helen Nissenbaum’s theory of Contextual Integrity to the 4th Amendment, it has become apparent that there are differences between how natural language would classify whether something is a search, a reasonable search, or an excused or unexcused reasonable search, and how the law would classify the same action. Now this is not a mind-blowing observation, as it has been understood for some time that the fact of some things being classified as “not a search” for Fourth Amendment purposes is just kind of weird. However, I believe the differing categorizations of the two areas have implications when asking what an ideal Fourth Amendment doctrine would look like, so I’ll explore that here.