Orin Kerr writes:
I recently mentioned my new short essay, Accounting for Technological Change, 36 Harv. J. of Law and Public Policy 403 (2013), about how the Supreme Court should resolve the lower court division on the Fourth Amendment rule for searching a cell phone incident to arrest. In light of that, I thought I would flag this morning’s decision by the Florida Supreme Court deepening the lower court division, Smallwood v. Florida. Smallwood rules that the police can routinely seize a cell phone incident to arrest, but they generally need a warrant to search it absent a demonstrated risk that evidence on the phone could be destroyed after it had been seized.
Read more on The Volokh Conspiracy.