Abstract
Advancements in technology have empowered law enforcement with new investigative tools, yet they have also increased their ability to invade citizens’ privacy similar to the general warrants of the eighteenth century. The Fourth Amendment was in part written to prevent an unfettered police state, with the Founders of the opinion that some criminals evading punishment would be a more favorable outcome. Following the Supreme Court’s decision to revoke the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, states took diverging paths in declaring their own policies on abortion, with some states banning and restricting abortion access and other states bolstering the right to abortion. This note explores how the Court’s decision and the states’ subsequent actions led to a hyper-focus on how law enforcement would use technology- based searches to prosecute citizens for obtaining an abortion. Particularly, this note focuses on the fear of using geofence warrants—a search warrant that requests user data for all devices found in a specific location at a specific time—to bring charges against those seeking abortions, whether geofence warrants are constitutional searches, and the attempts at state legislation made to assuage fears around these search devices. Ultimately, none of the proposed bills going as far as full bans on geofence warrants have successfully passed to date.
Link to Full Note:
Abortions, Location Data, and the Fourth Amendment: Geofence Warrants in a Post-Roe World