In making legal decisions, courts apply relevant law to facts. While the law typically changes slowly over time, facts vary from case to case. Nevertheless, underlying patterns of fact may emerge. This research focuses on underlying fact patterns commonly present in cases where motorists are stopped for a traffic violation and subsequently detained while a police officer conducts a canine sniff of the vehicle for drugs. We present a set of underlying patterns of fact, that is, factors of suspicion, that police and courts apply in determining reasonable suspicion. We demonstrate how these fact patterns can be identified and annotated in legal cases and how these annotations can be employed to fine-tune a transformer model to identify the factors in previously unseen legal opinions.

Determining if a court has applied a bright-line or totality-of-the-circumstances rule for Fourth Amendment cases demonstrates a difficult problem even for human lawyers and justices. Determining the type of test that governs an issue is essential to answering a legal question. Modern natural language processing (NLP) tools, such as transformers, demonstrate the capacity to extract relevant features from unlabelled text. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT transformer models to classify Fourth Amendment cases by bright-line or totality-of-the-circumstances rule. Two approaches are considered in which models are trained with either positive language extracted by a domain-expert or with full texts of cases. Transformers attain up to 92.31% accuracy on full texts, further demonstrating the capability of NLP techniques on domain-specific tasks even without handcrafted features.

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PLEA bargaining has been quite accurately described as "an informal, administrative, inquisitorial process of adjudication." 2 Those who brag of the superiority of the American criminal justice system often praise its adversarial, as opposed to inquisitorial, nature.' Yet for approximately ninetyfive percent of all defendants, the prosecutor is, for all practical purposes, the only judge they will encounter. 4 The prosecutor-judges who resolve these cases do so without necessarily referring to how any other case was resolved and do not follow any particular procedure, formal or informal, in deciding how to make offers.s Their decisions are not subject to review and largely avoid public scrutiny. 6 Defense lawyers, in part for reasons of their own making, are ill equipped for whatever idiosyncratic process a particular prosecutor's office

While many have observed the randomness of the Fourth Amendment's application, there has been little attempt to explain why the Supreme Court has allowed its doctrines on search and seizure to become so laden with irrational exceptions. Exceptions to the exclusionary rule are created, according to the Court, when the societal costs of excluding evidence outweigh the deterrent benefits. A look at the exceptions, however, reveals that something other than an attempt to avoid the most inefficient exclusion of evidence explains the exceptions. This essay argues that existing exceptions attempt to obscure the Court's willingness to find that deterring police officers is ever worth the cost of sacrificing the conviction of the guilty. A single exception could be developed that would better eliminate the most inefficient applications of the exclusionary rule: a good-faith exception for serious crimes. It is argued here that the Court's concern about acknowledging its acceptance of the exclusionary rule, however, will keep it from adopting such an exception, which would expressly recognize that certain applications of the rule are worthwhile. This essay suggests that the legislature is in a better position than the Court to adopt this alternative exception. The legislature is able to blame the Court for the existence of the exclusionary rule while offering a program of exceptions to the rule that would avoid the most extreme consequences of exclusion that the Court's rule would otherwise visit upon society. And the new exception would not be without popular appeal: murderers wouldn't get off on technicalities.