Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness standard a work in progress?

Criminal Procedure

By Timothy P. O’Neill

Timothy P. O’Neill is the Edward T. and Noble W. Lee Chair in Constitutional Law for 2014-15 at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago. Readers are invited to visit his Web log and archives at jmls.edu/oneill.

Posted August 1, 2016 1:44 PM

One of the last cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in June concerned the role of warrants in traffic stops where police want to use either blood or breath tests to determine the alcohol level of an arrestee. Birchfield v. North Dakota, No. 14-1468 (decided June 23).The result?In the words of Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, “The court split the baby.”On the one hand, the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. held that no warrant was necessary to administer a …

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