On April 27th, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Chatrie v. United States, on the Fourth Amendment implications of geofencing. I have already posted the amicus brief I wrote for the Court in the case, and I have decided to write a series of posts in anticipation of the argument. This is the first.
For my first post, I want to suggest that Chatrie may end up being decided on relatively narrow grounds. That's relevant because the Chatrie case implicates a very wide range of potential issues. The Court granted cert on the first of Chatrie's proposed Questions Presented, which was "[w]hether the execution of the geofence warrant violated the Fourth Amendment." But because the opinion following the en banc proceedings below was just a one line affirmance—as I detailed last year, no particular reasoning commanded a majority of the Fourth Circuit judges—what that might mean is, at least in theory, very open.
Broadly speaking, there are two sets of questions in the case. First, was the obtaining of records from Google a Fourth Amendment "search" of the suspect's "persons, houses, papers, [or] effects" that presumably triggered a warrant requirement? And second, if so, was the warrant constitutional? Each of those two questions breaks down into a lot of different sub issues. This means that a lot of really important conceptual issues in Fourth Amendment law are potentially in play.
