Utah v. Strieff and Teaching Analysis

(Excerpt) In Utah v. Strieff, the Supreme Court considered whether the Fourth Amendment required suppression of evidence obtained in an unlawful investigatory stop when police discovered that the person stopped was subject to lawful arrest based on an unrelated outstanding warrant. The majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, held that suppression was not required in such a case; the dissent by Justice Sotomayor argued that it should be. These two legal opinions took jarringly different approaches to determining a question of law, one that disproportionately impacts people of color, who are statistically most likely to be unlawfully stopped by the police. Notably, the authors of these two dueling opinions were the only two Supreme Court Justices of color at the time. On the one hand, Justice Thomas’s opinion was formalistic, concise, and grounded in abstract, logical reasoning. Justice Sotomayor, on the other hand, placed her legal analysis within the real-world context of police power abuses and their impact on people’s lives. Sotomayor’s cogent and passionate dissent sparked a public outcry that framed the majority opinion as “startling” in its “weakening” of the exclusionary rule, suggesting that the holding “gave police a fishing license” to look for criminal activity. Remarkably, even committed Court watchers had not flagged the case as one of the Term’s “biggies,” one that would have the media out in full force. Yet, on a day when the Court handed down four other opinions on rather mundane topics, suddenly Utah v. Strieff took the national media stage. Many scholars have analyzed the legal doctrines discussed in Strieff and Justice Thomas’s and Justice Sotomayor’s differing jurisprudential approaches. But this Article has a different focus. It seeks to address the concerns of many entering law students about whether they will be able to “think like a lawyer,” whether they must leave their own lived experiences at the law school door, and whether they must abandon their political values and become “objective.” It describes how the Strieff opinions provide a compelling and effective pedagogical tool for new law students to begin to understand and thoughtfully consider (a) the differences between legal formalism and legal realism; (b) the form and elements of classic legal analysis (including the interesting topic of defining words); (c) the roles of logic, empiricism, and emotion in legal decision-making; and (d) the reality and history of how law interacts with volatile issues of race in America. Finally, the Article seeks to illustrate how our legal system reflects the three methods humans use to discern “truth” in general: the mind (logic/rationality); the heart (intuition/emotion); and the body (real impacts/empiricism).