Quantifying Katz: Societal perspectives on reasonable expectations of privacy.

摘要

In 1967, Katz v. United States ruled that the protections of the Fourth Amendment's Search and Seizure Clause apply only when an individual's subjective expectation of privacy is objectively reasonable. In criminal cases, judges determine this without the benefit of data that could inform the judiciary about how society conceptualizes privacy which, in turn, would provide an empirical basis for deeming an expectation of privacy "objectively reasonable." The present study provides such data by " asking participants to rate on a Likert scale the degree of privacy they thought should be accorded to various areas under situations drawn from the fact-patterns of leading Fourth Amendment cases. The socio-legal and public policy implications of the results are explored.