Substantive Law Study Support

Putting It into Practice

1. Attorneys and their support staff are often required to research factual as well as legal matters. One of the issues at trial in the Quon matter was whether Quon had a reasonable expectation that his text messages would be private. In part, this could depend on the “security” of alphanumeric pager transmissions. Using the Internet or any other resources, find information about this topic and write a brief memo describing your findings.

Students may mention that pagers could have privacy and security advantages compared with cellular phones, since a one-way pager is a passive receiver only and does not send information back to its base station; in addition, its location cannot be tracked. A disadvantage of this system is that a message sent to the pager must be broadcast from every paging transmitter in its service area. Therefore, a pager with nationwide service could have a message intercepted by the city since it is within the same nationwide service area.

2. All states have state constitutions. Locate a copy of your state constitution and check to see if it contains any provisions similar to the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Answers will vary depending on the state, but students should address the following provisions of the Fourth Amendment: the right to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures and probable cause provisions.