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Notes -
Chatrie joins a host of other weird post-Carpenter lower court cases (pole cameras, mosaic cases, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore) where connection between the 4th Amendment's text and a more general free-standing limit on police action gets messy. If the rest of 4th Amendment caselaw wasn't such a clusterfuck, this wouldn't be so rough, but instead simultaneously a) if you're guilty, you can get out of it by arguing the police searched someone else too aggressively, b) if you're innocent, you have no recourse but being found not-guilty, and c) a host of other actual search of you specifically still don't count because mumblemumble. And it's just a punt onto the merits: I fully expect the 5th to go "okay, it's a reasonable search", maybe even snark about how technically precedent doesn't require warranted searches to be reasonable, and then SCOTUS to deny cert on the eventual appeal.
Watson is one of those cases where the textualist and originalist arguments could genuinely go either way. In theory, Congress could answer the question, in practice it won't. And military ballots make the election day cutoff hard to abide by (even if the Clinton-era mess makes everyone hypocrites).
Cook is... ugh. It's an important enough case that, as much as I bitch about Kavanaugh's results-oriented position, I at least have sympathy for it here. But on top of the questionable legal grounding, it's a decision answering arguments not even at question before the court, while punting the actual matter in question into an unsolvable procedural gimmick so it'll go away and not come back.
Why wouldn't it be a reasonable search, given that the police in Chatrie had a warrant?
The only thing the Supreme Court seems to be saying here is that you can't completely punt the issue by declaring it a non-search (because reasons) rather than a reasonable one.
"and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The question is whether "everything in that area" is particular enough.
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