4th Amendment

Morning Docket: 08.31.11

By

* You don’t have the right to get half naked in an airport to protest the TSA’s policies. Aaron Tobey’s lawsuit has been stripped of its Fourth Amendment claims following a dismissal. [Washington Post]

* Paul Ceglia has to give Facebook every email he’s exchanged since 2003. If Ceglia’s like most men, lawyers at Gibson Dunn will get an interesting peek at his private life. [Wall Street Journal]

* An HIV/AIDS group has been charged with improperly spending federal funds. They were supposed to open a job training center. They allegedly opened a strip club. Problem? [Washington Examiner]

* Pit bulls are cute until they bite your face off (but they do get a bad rap because of bad owners). This ADA lawsuit may help overturn residential dog breed restrictions in Colorado. [ABA Journal]

* In a case of a playboy getting hustled, a man is suing over a $28,109.60 bar tab charged on his credit card at the Hustler Club. Talk about going tit for tat. [New York Post]

7 Comments

Judge Alex Kozinski and his Famous Law Clerk, Stephanie Grace, Say The Fourth Amendment is Dead

By
The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments t...

Time to scratch off that Fourth one?

The Honorable Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and one of his law clerks have penned a eulogy for the Fourth Amendment. It’s been murdered, Judge Kozinski and Stephanie Grace write in an editorial for The Daily, and you all are the guilty culprits.

You’ve put a knife in it, by letting supermarkets track your shopping in exchange for loyalty discounts, letting Amazon and eBay store your credit card info, and letting Google track the websites you visit and take photos of your homes with satellites.

The problem, at least constitutionally speaking, is that the Fourth Amendment protects only what we reasonably expect to keep private. One facet of this rule, known as the third party doctrine, is that we don’t have reasonable expectations of privacy in things we’ve already revealed to other people or the public…

With so little left private, the Fourth Amendment is all but obsolete. Where police officers once needed a warrant to search your bookshelf for “Atlas Shrugged,” they can now simply ask Amazon.com if you bought it. Where police needed probable cause before seizing your day planner, they can now piece together your whereabouts from your purchases, cellphone data and car’s GPS. Someday soon we’ll realize that we’ve lost everything we once cherished as private.

via Remember what the Fourth Amendment protects? No? Just as well. | United States |Axisoflogic.com.

The lamentation for the loss of privacy has special resonance coming from these two, because it’s by one of the top federal judges in the country and that Stephanie Grace.

Read on at Forbes.com….

42 Comments

Non-Sequiturs: 05.17.11

By

* Starbucks sued for not being nice to dwarfs. I propose to fix this by offering a dwarf-sized coffee that is the volume of a full-sized dwarf. That way, everybody would learn that dwarfs might be small in stature but huge if you had to drink one. [ABA Journal]

* Happy is the lawyer who has clients who are worse at math than he is. [Constitutional Daily]

* It’s not that I think cops shouldn’t be allowed to break down doors if they fear evidence is being destroyed. It’s that I don’t want cops to break down my door for the crime of “owning a door while black,” while invoking the “we thought we smelled pot and he was smoking the evidence” exception. [Law & Technology / Forbes]

* Whenever America and France get into a fight, I always picture some German dude sitting around saying “Jå, Iago. Now das taschentuch!” [Simple Justice]

* Could Goodwin Liu get a hearing already? [The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times]

* Eric Schneiderman, if you want to be governor in 7 years, you’re going to have to give us a little more than this. [WSJ Law Blog]

5 Comments

Morning Docket: 04.18.11

By

* Apple was hit with a lawsuit by parents angry that their credit cards were being used by their stupid kids to buy dumb swag in iPhone games. [Time]

* An Italian fortune, an American woman, and the suggestion that paternity sometimes cannot be forcefully established by the simple query “Who dat is?” [New York Times]

* When police use GPS to lojack hoes that drive Volvos and Rodeos, can they do it without a warrant? [WSJ Law Blog]

* An article about the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20, or something like that. I’m not sure as I dozed off halfway through, like I regularly did during Ethics class in law school. [ABA Journal]

Eric Holder

* This post details various sports goings-on, like the possible move of the Sacramento Kings and former linebacker and all-around gentleman Bill Romanowski. Because Lat demands all the sports coverage we can find. [Am Law Daily]

* A possible explanation for Geoffrey Fieger’s outstanding website content. Smoking only the finest sticky icky. [Chicago Tribune]

* Eric Holder failed to pay taxes on his dead mother’s house. Until he did. Then the Post ran a story about when he didn’t. After he did. Super cool story, Post. [New York Post]

6 Comments

Slightly Crazy Blonde Disrobes for TSA

By

More fun than document review?

I’m surprised we’re not seeing more of this. As TSA continues to scan and/or feel-up everybody who gets on a plane, raising questions under the Fourth Amendment, an Oklahoman woman stripped down to her underwear to prove a point.

According to a report by News 9 – Oklahoma, Dr. Tammy Banovac, 52, arrived at the Oklahoma City airport wearing an overcoat and in a wheelchair. When she got to security, she removed the coat, revealing her curvaceous figure — clad in nothing but a black bra and panties. She refused to go through the metal detector, so she had to be subjected to a pat-down.

Is there video? Would I be posting this if there wasn’t?

double red triangle arrows Continue reading “Slightly Crazy Blonde Disrobes for TSA”

64 Comments
Page 3 of 3123