Chatrie and the Court’s Pretzel Logic: The Fourth Amendment Gets Twisted
The Supreme Court just told police they cannot turn your phone into a witness against you merely because you walked through the wrong patch of pavement. That is the good news. The less comforting news is that the Court reached that result by dragging some badly aging Fourth Amendment doctrine along for the ride.
In its June 29 Chatrie v. United States decision, the Court held 6-3 that law enforcement conducts a Fourth Amendment “search” when it forces companies like Google to turn over users’ location-history data through a geofence warrant.
That is a major win for digital privacy. A geofence warrant lets police demand information about every device in a defined area during a set time—essentially asking first and sorting suspects later. The Court was right to rein in that digital dragnet.
But peer under the hood of Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion, and the legal engine sputters. The Court reached the right destination, but took the scenic route through a swamp.
To preserve the aging Katz “reasonable expectation of privacy” test—and its creaky cousin, the third-party doctrine—the majority tied itself into a logical pretzel. Justice Neil Gorsuch, concurring only in the judgment, offered the cleaner and more textually grounded path the Court should have taken.