CCJ's Senior Scholar, Kathryne Young, Publishes in Stanford Law Review Paper on Consent-to-Search
Thursday, September 3
As part of our Access to Justice Scholars Program, CCJ's Senior Scholar for Empirical Access to Justice Research, Kathryne M. Young, published a study in the Stanford Law Review examining the Supreme Court's consent-to-search doctrine — testing the empirical assumptions it rests on. She finds that more than half the time, "consent" to a search is rooted in fear, distrust, or a sense of futility, with patterns varying by race, income, gender, marital status, and other characteristics. These gaps aren't explained by a lack of rights knowledge: informing people of their right to refuse a search has only a modest effect. It's an early and promising sign of the kind of rigorous, empirically grounded scholarship this initiative is designed to produce.