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St. John's Law Review, Summer 1998 by Bobis, Charles S

The articles in this symposium issue of the St. John's Law Review arise out of the conference that St. John's hosted on April 2 and 3, 1998, to mark the 30th anniversary of one of the United States Supreme Court's most important and controversial constitutional criminal procedure decisions, Terry v. Ohio. In Terry, the Court placed its constitutional imprimatur on the police investigative practice known as "stop and frisk," holding that the Fourth Amendment permits an officer, without a warrant and without probable cause to arrest, to stop and question a person who the officer reasonably suspects is engaged in criminal behavior, and to frisk the person for a weapon if the officer reasonably suspects the person may be armed and dangerous. The Court did not apply the Fourth Amendment's Warrant Clause and its probable cause requirement to this police practice. Instead, the Court employed a reasonableness balancing test to determine whether the officer's conduct violated the Fourth Amendment's proscription against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Terry decision and its mode of analysis have had a profound and lasting effect on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and policing in the United States.

The Terry conference brought together leading legal scholars, jurists, practitioners, and experts on law enforcement from throughout the United States. They explored Terry's impact on Fourth Amendment law, its place in legal theory, its effect on day-to-day policing, its impact on relations between minority populations and the police, and its relationship to the substantive criminal law. The St. John's Law Review is proud to provide this outstanding group of thinkers from the bench, bar, academy, and law enforcement the opportunity to illuminate one of the most important decisions in modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence by presenting the papers that grew out of the presentations at the seven conference panels. The authors have given generously of their time and talent to produce what we believe will become standard reference works in Fourth Amendment law and constitutional criminal procedure generally.

The contributions to this issue begin with papers based on what the conference organizers affectionately dubbed the "memoir" panel, which brought together several of the principal lawyers who litigated the Terry case and two of the Justices' law clerks who worked on the stop and frisk decisions behind the scenes. Congressman Louis Stokes, then an attorney in private practice in Cleveland, Ohio, represented Mr. Terry all the way to the Supreme Court, where he argued his case in December 1967. Mr. Reuben Payne, who as an assistant prosecutor in Cleveland was assigned to prosecute what seemed at the time a routine gun possession case, successfully litigated the Terry case at every stage of the proceedings. Judge Michael R. Juviler was, in 1967, the Deputy Chief of the Appeals Bureau in the office of legendary Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan. Judge Juviler briefed and argued, as amicus curiae, one of Terry's companion cases, Sibron v. New York. The article by my colleague, Professor John Barrett, takes us behind the scenes and illuminates the Court's process of deciding the stop and frisk cases in 1967-68. Articles by Professor Earl Dudley, Jr. and Associate Attorney General Raymond Fisher, who clerked for Chief Justice Warren and Justice Brennan, respectively, during the crucial 1967 Term of the Court, round out the "memoir" panel.

The second panel's papers examine Terry's effect on Fourth Amendment law. Was Terry marvel or mischief? Is it a decision that works for police and for citizens by striking an appropriate balance between law enforcement needs and individual liberty, or has it become a tool in the hands of lower courts for the continual expansion of police power over citizens through the use of categorical rules that undercut the fact-sensitivity at the core of the Terry doctrine? Articles by Professors Stephen Saltzburg and David Harris take up this debate, with reaction pieces by Professors George Thomas III and Daniel Richman.

The third conference panel looked to the future of Fourth Amendment law. Does Terry's balancing approach provide a proportionality principle that should serve as the conceptual framework for 21st Century search and seizure jurisprudence? Are there two Terry's, each pointing Fourth Amendment law in a different direction, one toward reasonableness as the touchstone of search and seizure law, the other toward warrants and probable cause? If so, which Terry is consistent with Fourth Amendment "first principles" and should be followed, and which should be rejected? These and other important questions are addressed in articles by Professors Christopher Slobogin and Akhil Amar. Responses by Professors Scott Sundby and Eric Muller enhance the debate about the proper direction of Fourth Amendment law as we approach the new millennium.

The contributions from the fourth conference panel shift the focus away from Terry itself to raise and debate significant questions about the current state and future prospects of a general theory of the Fourth Amendment. Are attempts by scholars to formulate a general theoretical solution to the problem of the Fourth Amendment doomed to failure because Fourth Amendment law is a "grown" not "made" system (using Friedrich Hayek's dichotomy), simply not amenable to the top-down analytical efforts in which many Fourth Amendment scholars are engaged? Should their efforts instead be redirected toward developing what might be called "local knowledge" about Fourth Amendment law? And how does the opposition between local and general theoretical knowledge impact on the Terry problem of regulating the behavior of the police in street stops? The article by Professor Ronald Allen and Mr. Ross Rosenberg begins the discussion, with Professors Carol Steiker and William Stuntz joining issue.