California once led the country in sterilizations of mentally disabled people. In the first half of the twentieth century, this practice, inspired by the then-socially-acceptable “science” of eugenics, was considered progressive. Such sterilizations became common around the country and were authorized by state law in California and many other states…

On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court held unanimously that the installation and use of a GPS tracker on a suspected drug dealer’s Jeep constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment. The outcome had been fairly well foreshadowed: At oral argument, the Justices had seemed perturbed by the thought that police could put trackers on cars—even the Justices’s own cars—seemingly at will…