“After Enlightenment, Return to the Marketplace”

Ever since John Locke argued that religion was essentially a “private search” and must be radically excluded from political life, we have prided ourselves in the West on the separation of church and state. John Esposito, of course, has famously ignored this shibboleth. In the past, students were not content to acquire a purely academic understanding of their faith; their aim was not to earn a doctorate or a professorship. Instead, they expected to be spiritually transformed by their studies—an experience that propelled them out of the classroom and back into the mundane, messy, and tragic world of politics. This essay traces this theme in Indian and Chinese traditions as well as in the three monotheistic faiths. All insist that poverty, inequity, cruelty, and exploitation are matters of sacred import and that after achieving Enlightenment one must, as the Buddha insisted, “return to the marketplace” and work practically and creatively to heal the suffering of humanity—a message that is sorely needed in our tragically broken world.

Better to Light a Candle

This chapter shows how an ideology of service was essential to the success of God’s Love We Deliver, a home meal delivery program founded in 1986 for people with AIDS. Under the charismatic leadership of Executive Director Ganga Stone, God’s Love deployed a rhetoric of service to speak to individuals’ private search for meaning during the AIDS crisis. God’s Love was premised upon the uncontroversial notion that food was love, a tangible offering of nourishment and care. The program offered New Yorkers a means of registering their concern for those suffering with AIDS regardless of their spiritual or political views (or lack thereof). For Stone, God’s Love was not about finding structural solutions, but about helping ordinary people to be of service and thus to bring joy and purpose into their lives. This strategic approach enabled the organization to redefine what it meant to “care” about AIDS and to amass a broad set of supporters and considerable resources. By proffering the image of the suffering, hungry person who needed help in the most immediate way possible, the ideology of service made AIDS more approachable even as it may have obscured other kinds of relationships based on solidarity or empowerment.

Carpenter's Legacy: Limiting the Scope of the Electronic Private Search Doctrine

One of the most significant challenges confronting courts and legal scholars in the twenty-first century is the application of Fourth Amendment doctrine to new technology. The circuit split over the application of the private search doctrine to electronic devices exemplifies how courts struggle to apply old doctrines to new circumstances. Some courts take the position that the old doctrine should apply consistently in the new context. Other courts have changed the scope of the old doctrine in order to account for the change in circumstances. The Supreme Court took the latter position in Carpenter v. United States and held that the third-party doctrine does not apply to cell-site location information records. The Court’s willingness to limit the scope of an established doctrine to preserve fundamental privacy interests suggests that Carpenter is just the beginning of a dramatic shift in Fourth Amendment law. This Note argues that the circuit split over the private search doctrine should be resolved by creating a narrow electronic private search doctrine based on the logic of Carpenter.

Lichtenberger and The Three Bears

Finding a happy medium is hard. Often, it is a challenge to find a workable balance between two unworkable extremes. Known as the “Goldilocks Principle,” this phenomenon has been observed in fields as diverse as developmental psychology and astrobiology. As Goldilocks found in the Three Bears’ house, “just right” may not come on the first attempt. We may have to explore the extremes of the spectrum—“too hot” and “too cold”—before we can settle on “just right. Goldilocks also discovered that this process is all the more difficult in a new environment—like the Three Bears’ house. Goldilocks persevered, however, until she found “just right.” Federal courts face a similar dilemma in the private search exception to warrant requirements under the Fourth Amendment. On one hand are legitimate individual privacy interests and on the other, the legitimate interests of law enforcement to protect society. Courts must not handcuff law enforcement agents in their duties in the name of individual privacy (“too cold”), but neither should they unreasonably curtail individual liberty by giving too much latitude to legitimate government interests (“too hot”). It is no small task to identify an appropriate compromise between the competing principles of protecting the privacy of American citizens and protecting American citizens from crime. Like Goldilocks, courts today also face this challenge in an unfamiliar world. What is the “just right” application of the private search exception in the world of digital storage devices, which hold staggeringly large amounts of data and whose structure challenges traditional Fourth Amendment concepts?