In Chatrie, Neil Gorsuch Reiterates His Critique of 2 Dubious Fourth Amendment Doctrines
What the left has said
Inferred left“Gorsuch Challenges Doctrines That Let Governments Surveil Digital Lives Freely”
Left-leaning observers have long argued that the third-party doctrine and the reasonable expectation test leave ordinary people, especially those targeted by law enforcement, with almost no meaningful digital privacy protection. The logic is structural: in an era when phone companies, apps, and social platforms collect nearly everything, a rule that strips constitutional protection from data you share with any third party effectively guts the Fourth Amendment for the digital age. Gorsuch's renewed critique in Chatrie aligns, at least in its conclusions, with advocacy groups like the ACLU and EFF who have spent years arguing these doctrines enable mass surveillance without a warrant. Progressive legal commentators typically frame this as a question of power imbalance, noting that corporations and governments share data in ways individuals neither understand nor consent to in any meaningful sense. That a conservative justice is pressing this argument creates rare common ground, though left-leaning critics would push further, urging the full Court to act rather than accumulate concurrences.
What the right says
Lean right“Gorsuch Argues Courts Should Return Fourth Amendment to Its Original Meaning”
From a conservative and libertarian standpoint, Gorsuch's opinion in Chatrie is a model of originalist restraint applied to a genuinely modern problem. His argument is straightforward: the Fourth Amendment protects people's papers and effects as a matter of property right, not as a function of what judges decide society currently expects. Reason, which covered the opinion from a libertarian-right perspective, emphasized Gorsuch's view that both the reasonable-expectation test and the third-party doctrine were judicial inventions that lack any grounding in the Constitution's text or history. The concern is that unelected judges effectively redraw privacy boundaries by deciding what expectations are 'reasonable,' a subjective standard that tends to shrink as surveillance expands. Gorsuch's preferred framework would anchor Fourth Amendment analysis in property and common-law rights, giving individuals a stable baseline rather than one that erodes with every new government capability. For small-government conservatives, that is exactly what constitutionalism should look like.