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Page Number: 106

8 

CARPENTER v. UNITED STATES 

GORSUCH, J., dissenting 

police  intrusions  when  they  investigate  more  serious 
crimes.  See  Blumenthal,  Adya,  &  Mogle,  The  Multiple 
Dimensions  of  Privacy:  Testing  Lay  “Expectations  of  Pri-
vacy,”  11  U.  Pa.  J.  Const.  L.  331,  352–353  (2009).    And  I 
very much doubt that this Court would be willing to adjust
its  Katz  cases  to  reflect  these  findings  even  if  it  believed 
them. 

Maybe,  then,  the  Katz  test  should  be  conceived  as  a 
normative question.  But if that’s the case, why (again) do 
judges,  rather  than  legislators,  get  to  determine  whether
society  should  be  prepared  to  recognize  an  expectation  of 
privacy  as  legitimate?    Deciding  what  privacy  interests 
should  be  recognized  often  calls  for  a  pure  policy  choice, 
many  times  between  incommensurable  goods—between 
the  value  of  privacy  in  a  particular  setting  and  society’s 
interest  in  combating  crime.    Answering  questions  like
that calls for the exercise of raw political will belonging to
legislatures, not the legal judgment proper to courts.  See 
The  Federalist  No.  78,  p.  465  (C.  Rossiter  ed.  1961)  (A.
Hamilton).  When  judges  abandon  legal  judgment  for 
political will we not only risk decisions where “reasonable 
expectations of privacy” come to bear “an uncanny resem-
blance  to  those  expectations  of  privacy”  shared  by  Mem-
bers  of  this  Court.  Minnesota  v.  Carter,  525  U. S.  83,  97 
(1998)  (Scalia,  J.,  concurring).    We  also  risk  undermining 
public confidence in the courts themselves.

My concerns about Katz come with a caveat.  Sometimes, 
I accept, judges may be able to discern and describe exist-
ing societal norms.  See, e.g., Florida v. Jardines, 569 U. S. 
1, 8 (2013) (inferring a license to enter on private property 
from the “ ‘habits of the country’ ” (quoting McKee v. Gratz, 
260 U. S. 127, 136 (1922))); Sachs, Finding Law, 107 Cal.
L. Rev.  (forthcoming  2019),  online  at  https://ssrn.com/ 
abstract=3064443 (as last visited June 19, 2018).  That is 
particularly  true  when  the  judge  looks  to  positive  law 
rather  than  intuition  for  guidance  on  social  norms.    See