if you read through some of the big case from the last couple decades, you'll see that there are plenty of principles guiding the court's fourth amendment juris

if you read through some of the big case from the last couple decades, you'll see that there are plenty of principles guiding the court's fourth amendment jurisprudence. i'd actually argue that the court's search and seizure doctrine has been far less affected by the "political winds" than many of its other bodies of case law in my opinion, the biggest problem faced by the court in fourth amendment cases isn't political pressure, but the subjective notions of privacy of the individual justices. they've lived lives that are very different than those of the average american, and as a result i think their perception of what makes an expectation of privacy reasonable is a bit off