Recommended Citation
Dana Raigrodski, No Reason for The Reasonable Person: Feminist Lessons from the Fourth Amendment, 1 Disorient: Critical Legal Journal of the Pacific Northwest (Jan. 2009)
No Reason for the Reasonable Person: Feminist Lessons from the Fourth Amendment
Keywords
feminist jurisprudence, Fourth Amendment, search and seizure, privacy, reasonable person, subordination
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This Article questions the universal reasonableness, objectivity, and a-perspectivity that the reasonable person standard and its specific application purport to embody. It aims to expose the inherent arbitrary and artificial construction of the 'reasonable person,' so that its maintenance can no longer be justified on grounds of rational, coherent, and bright guidelines. Once the logical analytical foundations of the reasonable person standard break down, feminist theories suggest that the courts maintain the fiction of the reasonable person as a mechanism of perpetuating patriarchy and subordinating women and others.