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 am writing a series of posts in anticipation of the argument. This is the second post in the series.
In this second post, I want to focus on how the Court hasn't handed down a case on the Fourth Amendment and new technology in a long time, and that it is now doing so in what amounts to an advisory opinion. These two things are related, I think. And for those of us interested in how Fourth Amendment law develops, they're related in an important way.
First, consider the timing. Chatrie comes after a surprisingly long gap in Supreme Court attention to how the Fourth Amendment should apply to new technologies. It has been 8 years since the Court's 2018 ruling in Carpenter v. United States on the Fourth Amendment implications of cell-site location information. That's a relatively long gap. After City of Ontario v. Quon in 2010 on pagers, United States v. Jones in 2012 on GPS devices, Riley v. California in 2014 on searching cell phones incident to arrest, the Microsoft warrant case in 2018, and Carpenter that same year, it had become a staple of the Justices' speeches that Court was going to have to take a lot of cases on the Fourth Amendment and digital technologies in the future.
