For more than a century, careful readers of the Green Bag have known that “[t]here is nothing sacred in a theory of law...which has outlived its usefulness or which was radically wrong from the beginning...The question is What is the law and what is the true public policy?” Professor Orin...

This Article uses economic concepts to understand search and seizure law, the law governing government investigations that is most often associated with the Fourth Amendment. It explains search and seizure law as a way to increase the efficiency of law enforcement by accounting for external...

This short essay considers how the Fourth Amendment should apply to the search of a cellular phone seized incident to arrest. It argues that the storage capacity and type of evidence stored on a cell phone justifies a departure from existing Fourth Amendment doctrine. Under United States v....

When does conduct by an online player in a virtual world game trigger liability for a real-world crime? In the future, will new criminal laws be needed to account for new social harms that occur in virtual worlds? This short essay considers both questions. Part I argues that existing laws...

This essay argues that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should be restructured to account for changes in communications technology and Fourth Amendment law since FISA's enactment in 1978. FISA reflects the person-focused assumptions of 1970s-era technology and constitutional law. At...

This Article argues that administrative law doctrines should not apply to judicial review of the patent system. The dynamics of patent law derive not from public law regulation, but rather from the private law doctrines of contract, property, and tort. A patent is akin to a unilateral contract...

Does encrypting Internet communications create a reasonable expectation of privacy in their contents, triggering Fourth Amendment protection? At first blush, it seems that the answer must be yes: A reasonable person would surely expect that encrypted communications will remain private. In this...

Why is the Warrant Clause of the Fourth Amendment so modest in national security investigations? This symposium essay argues that the Warrant Clause has a narrow role because the extension of the Warrant Clause into national security law forces courts to pose a question that judges cannot...

This Article offers a general framework for applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet. It assumes that courts will seek a technology-neutral translation of Fourth Amendment principles from physical space to cyberspace, and it considers what new distinctions in the online setting can reflect...