Is this then a done deal? Or can the Supreme Court somehow decide there was a half-sentence in a Federalist Paper which argued the opposite and invalidate the ruling?
This is a ruling by a District Court. It could be appealed to the Circuit Court, and then to the Supreme Court.
In the federal court system, District Court decisions are not binding precedent. Circuit Court decisions bind the District Courts in their circuit, and Supreme Court decisions bind all lower courts.
This District Court is in the Second Circuit. Another District Court in the same Circuit made a similar decision in US v. Smith, but the Second Circuit Court has not yet ruled on warrantless border searches of cell phones. Several other Circuit Courts have, however, and their rulings were all opposite of this one: the First Circuit in Alasaad v. Mayorkas; the Fifth Circuit in US v. Castillo; the Seventh Circuit in US v. Wanjiku; and the Ninth Circuit in US v. Cano.
In short: this decision is not binding precedent, and a substantial amount of binding precedent exists in the opposite direction within other circuits.
Exactly this. (and for those unfamiliar with the terms, in federal courts "Circuit Courts" are the first level of appeals courts, which both sides have a right to be heard in, followed by the Supreme Court which is discretionary and only takes on big cases)
When there is a "circuit split" like this, with different appellate courts going in opposite directions you are almost 100% guaranteed SCOTUS has to step in to fix it.
I don't know the outcome of this, as I've not studied border searches in years, but while SCOTUS went in the favor of defendants on prior search cases (e.g. Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373, cellphone searches on person during arrest; Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. ___ (2018), cellphone GPS logs from carrier; United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), GPS attached to car), the court has changed to the right, which generally (but not always) means less defendant-friendly, more government-friendly.
If I had to wager, SCOTUS will uphold warrantless border searches.
With this SCOTUS it's really hard to tell... while they've mostly aligned to state actors, there are a few instances, in particular 2A cases where they've leaned into favoring civil liberties over state actors, so it could really go either way IMO.
That said, my own take has been for a while, that if I travel across borders that I'd specifically buy a burner phone and something cheap like a chromebook, possibly in the country being travelled to and expressly wiped clean before travel if taking said device across the border. Keeping some printed/written notes with contacts that I can establish on the other side.
It's kind of weird in that I don't think the above is excessively paranoid given how intrusive state actors can be, not just the US.
SCOTUS doesn't always make shitty decisions. Sometimes dozens of lower courts will all make a shitty decision and then it gets to SCOTUS and they somehow use their greater resources to produce a better decision contrary to everyone's expectations.
That 2012 decision was unanimous, including all the conservatives. Roberts, Thomas and Alito all held GPS tracking without a warrant to be unconstitutional, along with Scalia (now deceased).
If the exact same case came before the Court today, would it rule differently? I doubt. One must assume Roberts, Thomas and Alito would rule the same way. Ideologically, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are all less conservative than Thomas and Alito, more conservative than Roberts – which suggests if Roberts, Thomas and Alito are all ruling the same way, probably Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett would too. And Jackson is both a liberal, and has been seen to be defendant-friendly even when the other liberals wouldn't be (see when she joined all but of the conservatives in the recent J6 case, while Barrett joined the remaining liberals). So probably, that case would go the same way today as it did in 2012.
Now, this is a separate issue, so the outcome of that 2012 case isn't decisive in how this case would be decided (if it ever reaches SCOTUS). But it would be wrong to assume that SCOTUS becoming significantly more conservative is necessarily going to change the outcome.
A textualist interpretation of the constitution would likely take a very dim view of the federal government trying to stretch its powers and get around the Fourth Amendment. I don’t think we have much to worry about on this topic from the current court.
For the Hacker News members who are reflexively downvoting my comment, presumably for political reasons, I refer you to Riley vs. California, the 2014 SCOTUS decision that ruled warrantless searches of cell phones were unconstitutional:
The opinion was written by Roberts with a concurrence by Alito.
Again, presumably, the 2024 court is likely to take an even a dimmer view of the Feds trying to expand their powers and circumvent the 4th Amendment than the 2014 court.
> textualist interpretation of the constitution would likely take a very dim view of the federal government trying to stretch its powers and get around the Fourth Amendment
Scalia was textualist. "Justices Antonin Scalia, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch describe themselves as originalists in scholarly writings and public speeches" [1]. (In several cases, e.g. the application of Sarbanes-Oxley to the January 6th cases, they dismissed a textualist interpretation.)
Textualism would have trouble with this case because phones aren't mentioned in the Constitution. Originalism does better, which explains Riley.
Originalism would also have trouble because phones didn't exist when the Frames wrote or the 18th Century public read the Constitution.
Originalism is funny, by the way. By its tenets, if you don't like what the Constitution says, you can pass an Amendment with the exact same words as the Constitution but those words would have new, different meaning.
Scalia’s originalism—the dominant strain today—is textualism, as explained in the very article you linked. Specifically it is originalism in terms of the original public meaning of the text, or in other words, textualism with the understanding that language changes over time.
Alternatively, when the Supreme court composition has changed and shown a willingness to view old decisions as bad law, its a great time for a district court to break rank with precedent.
We have a couple decades to shape the country however you want, you don’t have to act like a victim because the justices lied during their confirmation hearings on one specific topic, just bring different cases for other various inconveniences you have.
