Recommended Citation
Dana Raigrodski, Consent Engendered: A Feminist Critique of Consensual Fourth Amendment Searches, 16 Hastings Women's L.J. 37 (2004), https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-articles/402
Publication Title
Hasting Women's Law Journal
Keywords
feminist legal theory, Fourth Amendment
Document Type
Article
Abstract
As I will argue, the Court's consent-to-search cases are driven by this patriarchal ideology to maintain social structures of power disparities and to perpetuate the subordination of women, minorities, and other disempowered members of society.
We need to acknowledge the power and submission paradigm that underlies police-citizen encounters and to scrutinize the entire notion of consent. In order to confront both power and consent, I will turn to feminist critique of consent, particularly in the area of rape, and to feminist writings about choice and agency. Based on these writings I will argue that by distinguishing coerced consent to a search (which is not consent altogether) from truly voluntary consent the Court renders invisible the falsity of the dichotomy between coercion and choice and their interplay in our patriarchal society.