There are a lot of blogs that cover legal affairs. Many simply are not written well or don’t provide in depth analysis of complicated legal issues. The SCOTUS blog does both, as illustrated by this piece written by Amy Howe.

The article deals with the case pending before the Supreme Court regarding the ability of the police to “search” cell phones without a warrant:

It was a series of events straight out of the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie – the Law and Order edition.  The storyline goes something like this:  If you are driving a car with expired tags, the police might pull you over.  If they do, they will ask to see your driver’s license.  When you give it to them, they will run a computer check and learn that it has been suspended.  So they decide to impound the car.  But before they tow the car away, they search it.  When they search it, they discover two handguns under the hood, so they arrest you.  When they arrest you, they take your smart phone.  When they take your smart phone, they read your text messages.  When they read the messages, they see texts which suggest that you might be a member of a local gang.  Based in part on those texts, they suspect that you may have been involved in a gang-related shooting a couple of weeks ago, and so they look at your phone again, where they find more evidence to support the theory that you belong to a gang and were involved in the shooting.

Continue reading here.