A Debate Over the Open Fields Doctrine and Fourth Amendment Law
I recently posted about the open fields doctrine of Fourth Amendment law, the rule that it is not a “search” under the Fourth Amendment for the government to trespass on to your open field. In my post, I argued that the contrary rule argued by some advocates, that passage onto a person’s land should be a search, conflicts with the text of the Fourth Amendment. The constitutional language specifically protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” and it’s hard […]