Drug Dogs and the Fourth Amendment

Orin Kerr over at Volokh has an interesting post about a pending cert petition on the limits of using drug dogs before implicating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Under Illinois v. Caballes, the use of the dog around a car is not a “search” and therefore outside the Fourth Amendment. The question is, does the Caballes rule apply when the dog is brought to the front door of a home rather than a car? A divided Florida Supreme Court ruled in Jardines v. State that Caballes does not apply and that probable cause is required to bring the dog up to the home for a sniff.

My guess is that the Court will draw a distinction between your home and your car, and say that the two rules do not "conflict". You certainly can't have a ruling that allows drug dogs to go house-to-house without some other  indication of illegal activity. Your car isn't your house, and when you're traveling down the road, there's less expectation of privacy than in your home. In any event, if you're a law-geek or someone who does drugs, you may want to read the whole article.