Stern on Homes and the Fourth Amendment

Stephanie Stern  (Chicago-Kent College of Law) has posted The Inviolate Home: Housing Exceptionalism in the Fourth Amendment (Cornell Law Review, Vol. 95, 2010)  on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This Article challenges Fourth Amendment housing exceptionalism. Specifically, I critique two hallmarks of housing exceptionalism: first, the extension of protection to residential spaces unlikely to shelter intimate association or implicate other key privacy interests; and second, the prohibition of searches that impinge on core living spaces but do not harm interpersonal and domestic privacy. Contrary to claims in the case law and commentary, there is little evidence to support the broad territorial conception of privacy inherent to the “sanctity of the home,” a vital personhood interest in the physical home, or even uniformly robust subjective privacy expectations in varying residential contexts. Similarly, closer examination of the political and historical rationales for housing exceptionalism reveals a nuanced, and equivocal, view of common justifications for privileging the home. This Article advocates replacing the broad sweep of housing exceptionalism, and its emphasis on the physical home, with a narrower set of residential privacy interests that are more attentive to substantive privacy and intimate association.