"A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not give rise to probable cause to search that person"
About this Quote
Stewart’s line is a quiet rebuke to one of the state’s oldest temptations: the urge to treat association as evidence. “Mere propinquity” is doing a lot of work here. The phrase is almost antiseptic, a judge’s way of stripping a police hunch down to its bones and finding it constitutionally weightless. By choosing that chilly, precise vocabulary, Stewart denies law enforcement the comfort of moral narrative. No insinuations. No “you know the type.” Just the hard legal question: what, exactly, ties this individual to a justified search?
The specific intent is doctrinal and political at once. Doctrinally, he’s reinforcing the Fourth Amendment’s demand for individualized suspicion. Probable cause can’t be outsourced to the company you keep, because that would turn the warrant requirement into a dragnet with better PR. Politically, it’s a warning against guilt by association dressed up as public safety, a move that lands especially sharply in an era when policing strategies often leaned on rounding up the “usual suspects” and letting proximity substitute for proof.
The subtext is that the Constitution is supposed to be a friction point, not a formality. Stewart is insulating ordinary social life from becoming a liability: standing on a sidewalk, riding in a car, visiting a friend. If proximity alone were enough, whole neighborhoods could be rendered searchable, and “probable cause” would become a geographic and social status, not a factual showing. The sentence works because it’s both modest and absolute: it doesn’t romanticize the suspect; it limits the government.
The specific intent is doctrinal and political at once. Doctrinally, he’s reinforcing the Fourth Amendment’s demand for individualized suspicion. Probable cause can’t be outsourced to the company you keep, because that would turn the warrant requirement into a dragnet with better PR. Politically, it’s a warning against guilt by association dressed up as public safety, a move that lands especially sharply in an era when policing strategies often leaned on rounding up the “usual suspects” and letting proximity substitute for proof.
The subtext is that the Constitution is supposed to be a friction point, not a formality. Stewart is insulating ordinary social life from becoming a liability: standing on a sidewalk, riding in a car, visiting a friend. If proximity alone were enough, whole neighborhoods could be rendered searchable, and “probable cause” would become a geographic and social status, not a factual showing. The sentence works because it’s both modest and absolute: it doesn’t romanticize the suspect; it limits the government.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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