Double Reasonableness and the Fourth Amendment
Recently the Supreme Court has placed new limits on both the substance of the Fourth Amendment and the exclusionary that serves as the principal remedy for Fourth Amendment violations. In this Article we briefly summarize these limitations and then argue that the curtailment of the exclusionary rule has the potential to ameliorate substantive Fourth Amendment doctrine. The limited reach of the modern exclusionary rule provides the Court with license to develop an expansive new substantive framework free of the specter of a correspondingly expansive remedial framework. One point on which nearly all jurists and commentators agree is that current Fourth Amendment doctrine is a mess. We argue that the Court’s exclusionary rule cases, while frustrating and ill-conceived if viewed in isolation, provide the Court with an opportunity to revisit problematic Fourth Amendment doctrine that was born under a very different remedial regime. Such an approach would allow the Court to adhere to its current view of the exclusionary rule as a remedy of last resort while creating a Fourth Amendment with teeth. The goal is a Fourth Amendment right that is more substantial and clearly defined, but a remedy that remains limited to egregious violations of clear substantive rules. The time is now to lift the Fourth Amendment fog.
The Green to Blue Pipeline: Defense Contractors and the Police Industrial Complex
Images of police in tactical gear, pointing automatic weapons at unarmed demonstrators in Ferguson, Missouri, represented a flashpoint in public awareness that American police are rapidly militarizing. Federal grants have been quietly arming police with tanks, drones, and uniforms more suited to waging war than patrolling the streets. As police have acquired more military gear, SWAT teams and deployments have proliferated. Even small towns receive surplus military materiel to fight the “wars” on drugs and terrorism. In addition, police training uses a military approach that threatens to transform the traditional police mandate of protecting and serving into one of engaging and defeating. This Article is the first in legal scholarship to analyze the causes of police militarization and the obstacles to curbing it.This Article analyzes the factors that drive police militarization, from a historical, legal and financial perspective. It examines the multiple federal grant programs that provide the funding for, and incentivize, militarization, like the Department of Defense Program that distributes military materiel with little oversight regarding its use, and the Department of Homeland Security grant program that dispenses billions in funds to buy weapons and equipment. It exposes defense industry efforts to ensure Congress keeps the gear flowing; as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wind down, the industry turns to the domestic market to fill the gap in sales. The Article analyzes the failure of the judicial system to address excessive force claims in the context of ever-increasing SWAT raids, and proposes more effective routes to reform.
Changes in interpersonal perception as a means of reducing cognitive dissonance.
one of two (low choice). Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) found that the greater the monetary incentive for 5s to argue the merits of a series of boring tasks, the less were the 5s own attitudes toward the tasks likely to become more favorable. The greater apparent choice in the low incentive condition seemed to produce greater dissonance regarding the persuasion attempt, and this dissonance was reduced when the 5s rated the tasks as more enjoyable than 5s in the high incentive (low choice) condition. The present experiment is both an extension of the above considerations into the area of person perception and an investigation of an alternative mode of dissonance reduction which has largely been ignored in experimental predictions from dissonance theory: the possibility of withdrawing or canceling out one's discrepant behavior instead of showing accommodating changes in attitude. A recent paper by Jones and Thibaut (1958) emphasized the importance of interaction context in constructing any sensitive and comprehensive theory of person perception. Specifically emphasized in this paper was the role played by the perceiver in denning the situation and eliciting information from the stimulus person. In situations where one individual (A) has, for whatever reason, behaved toward another (B) in a manner which is discrepant with his private feelings about B, we might well expect the production of dissonance and a consequent change in A's attitude toward B. At least dissonance theory alerts us to this possibility and suggests the conditions under which such attitude change might occur. If Person A is pressured by strong incentives or imperative role demands to behave in an overly warm or overly hostile fashion toward B, we would expect little change in A's private impression of B. If, however, A is less certain about what is expected and perceives alternative ways of responding to B, the same extreme behavior would likely produce corresponding changes in A)NG the problem areas to which Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance may be applied, none has been as intensively explored in recent experiments as the area of attitude change. The paradigm of creating in an experimental group high dissonance that may be reduced by alterations of belief or feeling has been applied with reference to such attitudinal objects as toys (Brehm & Cohen, 1959b), consumer objects (Brehm, 1956), the interest value of a particular experimental task (Brehm & Cohen, 1959a; Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), nonfavored vegetables (Brehm, 1959), membership in a discussion group (Aronson & Mills, 1959), marriage before 23 (Cohen, Terry, & Jones, 1959), and cheating (Mills, 1958). In spite of the heterogeneity of research settings, almost all of these studies have involved the creation of cognitive dissonance by inducing the subject (5) to engage in some behavior running counter to his private belief. It has been theoretically proposed and empirically verified that, above the minimum of pressure required to induce the S to perform the discrepant behavior, the greater the force to comply the less the resulting dissonance and the smaller the tendency to adjust one's private beliefs to support the act of compliance. If an individual has no alternative but to behave in a fashion running counter to his beliefs, relatively little dissonance is created—it is as if he sees himself as the passive victim of fate. If he sees the possibility of behaving in a different fashion more consonant with his beliefs, and still performs in a manner at odds with his private feelings, more dissonance is created. Following this logic, there has been much explicit interest in the variable, "degree of choice." For example, Brehm and Cohen (1959b) found that children, asked to choose one of cither two or four toys to keep, increased their liking of the chosen toy more when it was one of four (high choice) than when it was