Abstract
In United States v. Chatrie, the Fourth Circuit issued the first federal appellate opinion on the Fourth Amendment status of geofencing queries. The opinion is significant because geofences present a conceptual challenge to the framework of Carpenter v. United States, the reigning Supreme Court precedent on the Fourth Amendment status of digital searches. That opinion held that long-term tracking of a target individual was a search. However, geofencing reveals information about an indeterminate number of individuals for only a short time, in virtue of their being at a target location during a target span of time. Does the reasoning for the former holding in Carpenter entail that the latter is a search, too? I argue that the answer is no, unless Carpenter is given an ambitious interpretation. The court in Chatrie refused to go that far, and so held that the geofence at issue was not a search. I do not celebrate this result. Instead, I think it illustrates the limitations of Carpenter, doctrinally speaking, and the need to confront those limitations with eyes open.
Recommended Citation
Jordan Wallace-Wolf, Unfenced: The Fourth Circuit Gives Geofencing Its First Appellate Go-Ahead in United States v. Chatrie, 82 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. Online 1 (2024), https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr-online/vol82/iss1/2
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