U.S. Supreme Court
Mar. 12, 2013
Rights, but no remedies
In Clapper, the Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge a secret wiretap because they had no way of knowing whether their communications were actually intercepted. This cannot be right. By Erwin Chemerinsky





Erwin Chemerinsky
Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law
UC Berkeley School of Law
Erwin's most recent book is "Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism." He is also the author of "Closing the Courthouse," (Yale University Press 2017).
Is it possible that the U.S. government could systematically violate the First and Fourth Amendment rights of large numbers of its citizens, but no court could stop it? This seems unthinkable, but it is exactly what the Supreme Court recently held in Clapper v. Amnesty International, 2013 DJDAR 2452 (Feb. 23, 2013). The court ruled 5-4 that no one has standing to challenge the secret wiretapping authorized by the Foreign Intelligence S...
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