Featured Paper: Is the Court Allergic to Katz? Problems Posed by New Methods of Electronic Surveillance to the "Reasonable-Expectation-of Privacy" Test

Colin Shaff, a 3L at USC, has a new student note worth checking out: Is the Court Allergic to Katz? Problems Posed by New Methods of Electronic Surveillance to the "Reasonable-Expectation-of Privacy" Test. It appears in the Spring 2014 edition of the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal.

The note discusses Jones, Katz, Olmstead, FISA, the ECPA, and many other facets of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

An excerpt from the intro:

This Note will examine the way in which the Court and Congress have reacted to the challenges posed by emerging technology with regards to the Fourth Amendment’s “unreasonable search and seizure” clause. This Note argues that the best balance between protecting personal liberties and respecting the needs of law enforcement occurs when the Court, Congress, and state legislatures collaborate to craft robust statutory schema; in contrast, when the Court makes decisions without legislative input or when Congress acts without judicial guidance, the resulting law is often inadequate or incomplete.