Drug Testing and the Courts
Fourth Amendment Protection From Unreasonable Searches
The constitutional focus of drug-testing litigation has been the Fourth Amendment, which protects the "right of the people" to be free from "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the government. This constitutional stricture applies to all government action — Federal, State, and local — by its own force or through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Government conduct will generally be found to constitute a "search" for Fourth Amendment purposes where it infringes on "an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to consider reasonable." If a search or seizure has occurred, the court must then determine whether the…
