Visual Piece |
Project Reflection This mini-project was about search and seizure laws under the 4th Amendment. We learned about the difference between reasonable suspicion and probable cause (and how they pertain to the legality of a search), what happens and what you should do when you get pulled over, and how your rights change while you’re in school. After dissecting the 4th Amendment itself, we discussed warrants, what it takes to get one, and what it means to have one. We also analyzed different situations and documented cases to see how the terms we were learning applied to real police/authority interactions. Our final product was to create an informational visual piece based on one of the topics we covered in class, and present it to the school.
The piece of content I chose to focus on was the legal exceptions to the warrant requirement. It drew my interest because a lot of the controversy in the cases we looked at in class revolved around whether or not a search was reasonable, which often depended on the officer having a warrant. I was curious to explore instances in which a warrant wouldn’t exactly be necessary to conduct a legal search.This brought me to a website detailing the six legal exceptions to the warrant requirement, which really drew me to this topic even more because it was using all the terms we’d covered in class to justify the need for a warrant (reasonable suspicion, probable cause, etc.) and instead using them to justify not getting a warrant. It was really interesting to me to see how these seemingly cemented legal terms could actually apply to such a variety of situations, of flip to support the other side of an argument. |