The difficulty some of the Justices had with pager technology in City of Ontario v. Quon yesterday reminds me of a passage in an article of mine on why judges should be cautious about applying the Fourth Amendment to new technologies. In the passage, I argue that judges are particularly likely to make errors in […]
Archive | City of Ontario v. Quon
Was the Stored Communications Act Actually Violated in City of Ontario v. Quon?
At today’s oral argument in City of Ontario v. Quon, several Justices took the view that whether Fourth Amendment “reasonable expectation of privacy” existed in the case depended in part on whether the disclosure violated the Stored Communications Act (SCA), an electronic privacy statute. That raises a surprisingly tricky question: Was the Stored Communications Act […]
Thoughts on the Oral Argument in City of Ontario v. Quon
I was at the Supreme Court this morning for oral argument in City of Ontario v. Quon, the Fourth Amendment text messaging case. Here are a few thoughts from what I heard over the speakers from the Lawyer’s Lounge: 1) Based on the questions, the strongest proponent of Fourth Amendment protection in this case appeared […]
Some Thoughts on the Reply Brief in City of Ontario v. Quon
The Reply Brief in the Court’s only major Fourth Amendment case this term, the text-messaging case City of Ontario v. Quon, has now been filed and is available here. Here are a few thoughts on it. (1) The parties focus significant attention on the Stored Communications Act, somewhat to my surprise. The Stored Communications Act […]
Will the Supreme Court Rethink Public Employee Privacy Rights in Quon?
The announcement of the cert grant in City of Ontario v. Quon means that the Supreme Court will revisit for the first time the splintered decision in O’Connor v. Ortega, 480 U.S. 709 (1987), that created the modern framework of public employee privacy rights. That raises the possibility that the Court might change the basic […]