Document Type

Article

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 searches 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 33,00o 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 timestamp 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. Ninety-eight percent of warrant reviews eventually result in an approval, and over 93% are approved on first submission. Further, we find that the median time for review is only three minutes, and that one out of every ten warrants is opened, reviewed, and approved in sixty seconds or less. Our analyses that account for warrant complexity and length also suggest that many approved warrants are either not read carefully or not read in full (or both). We also perform a qualitative

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