St. John's Law Review Volume 93 Number 1 Volume 93, 2019, Number 1 Article 4 A Warrant Requirement Resurgence? The Fourth Amendment in the Roberts Court Benjamin J. Priester Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/lawreview This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at St. John's Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in St. John's Law Review by an authorized editor of St. John's Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. A WARRANT REQUIREMENT RESURGENCE? THE FOURTH AMENDMENT IN THE ROBERTS COURT † BENJAMIN J. PRIESTER INTRODUCTION Over many years, the United States Supreme Court has developed an extensive body of precedent interpreting and enforcing the provisions of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures by law enforcement agents conducting criminal investigations. Commonly called the “warrant requirement,” one key component of this case law operates to deem some police investigatory techniques to be unconstitutional unless they are conducted pursuant to a search warrant issued in advance by a judge. The terms of the doctrine and its exceptions also authorize other investigatory actions as constitutionally permissible without a search warrant. The doctrinal framework created by the warrant requirement serves as a core foundational principle of the Court’s constitutional criminal procedure for police investigations. The conventional wisdom about the warrant requirement suggests that over the last half-century, the Court has moved from rigorously interpreting and enforcing the doctrine to reducing its importance and recognizing more exceptions for permissible warrantless searches.