Chatrie v. United States · ¶88

Even if I could overlook that problem with Katz, I still wouldn’t know how to apply it. As the Court has candidly admitted, it has never been able to identify a “single rubric” that might “definitively resolv[e] which expectations of privacy are entitled to protection.” Carpenter, 585 U. S., at 304 (majority opinion). Maybe Katz poses an empirical question, tagging reasonable expectations of privacy to those privacy expectations “people actually have.” Carpenter, 585 U. S., at 392 (GORSUCH, J., dissenting). Or maybe the question is a normative one, asking what expectations reasonable people “should . . . have.” Ibid. In truth, nobody knows and, either way, this Court is the wrong body for the task. We aren’t equipped to make empirical assessments about what most Americans think. Nor is it our job to enforce our own normative judgments, as opposed to those embodied in the Constitution…

slip opinion
Source edition
Passage preview. Read in context for the complete text, notes and references.