Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Criminal Procedure
Abstract
Every year, police perform searches governed by the Fourth Amendment on hundreds of thousands of individuals and their property throughout the United States. Many of the academy’s most decorated scholars have focused on the genesis and jurisprudential nature of the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Surprisingly, we know almost nothing about how the Fourth Amendment regulates searchers and how searches actually work in practice.
In this Article, we pull back the curtain on the search and seizure process by presenting the largest quantitative study of warrants of any kind. We analyze over 33,000 warrant applications filed through Utah’s “e-warrants” system over a three-year period. By utilizing the full texts of the warrant affidavits along with digital time-stamp metadata, we categorize warrants by type, length, and complexity and establish when and for how long judges review warrants. Our key findings demonstrate that the warrant review process is fast and nearly always results in approval. 98 percent of warrant reviews eventually result in an approval, and over 93 percent are approved on first submission. Further, we find that the median time for review is only three minutes, and that 1 out of every 10 warrants are opened, reviewed, and approved in 60 seconds or less. Our analyses that account for warrant complexity and length also suggest that many approved warrants are not read in full, and that there is no meaningful relationship between warrant length and review time. We also perform a qualitative analysis of a randomly selected sub-sample of warrants and find cases where the review process has clearly failed.
Taken together, our results have critical implications regarding the warrant review process that force us to reconsider the constitutional nature of probable cause and the role that judicial review plays as a “check” on police searches. In light of these implications, we explore the political, economic, and logistical constraints that judges face when reviewing warrants and consider pathways to reform that are mindful of these factors.
Final version available here
Recommended Citation
de Figueiredo, Miguel; Hashimoto, Brett; and Thorley, Dane, "Unwarranted Warrants? An Empirical Analysis of Judicial Review in Search and Seizure" (2025). Faculty Articles and Papers. 636.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/law_papers/636
